Identity theft marks its 453rd anniversary this summer. In 1556, a man named Arnaud du Tilh arrived in the French village of Artigat claiming to be Martin Guerre, a peasant who had left his wife and child eight years earlier. The man fitted Martin Guerre’s profile. He looked like Martin Guerre. He repeated a number of facts about Martin Guerre. And he was accepted as Martin Guerre by Martin Guerre’s wife with whom he went on to have two children. It wasn’t until the real Martin Guerre turned up in 1560 – minus a leg – that du Tilh confessed. He was hanged in front of Guerre’s house.

Today’s identity thieves have less to fear. They also have much more opportunity and they’re becoming increasingly sophisticated too. They no longer need to rely on an uncanny resemblance to a missing husband to win themselves an easy life, and they don’t even have to rummage around in suburban garbage cans for old bank letters to pick up useful information.

The rise of social networking means that anyone can now gather all sorts of valuable data about almost anyone else and create fake profiles that steal trust and win confidence. Email phishers, garbage scourers and credit card copiers might have followed du Tilh with their version of Identity Theft 1.0 but the new upgraded version is a lot smarter, a lot less reliant on the greed of phishing victims and the carelessness of bank customers… and a lot more pernicious.

Facebook Has 243 Brad Pitts

The two places most at risk are Facebook and Twitter, neither of which can verify the owners of accounts at the time they’re created. For the most part, the motives behind those profiles are more likely to be playful than deliberately malicious. Everyone dreams of being a Hollywood superstar but there are currently 243 people on Facebook pretending to be Brad Pitt. This guy though isn’t convincing anyone and it’s unlikely that any user is going to be taken in by the other 242 Mr. Jolies. In fact, skepticism about the true identity of celebrities on social media sites is so widespread that even Jonah Lehrer, an author and editor for Wired, has been asked whether his Twitter profile is real – as if someone would fake a geeky intellectual.

That means that it’s actually the un-famous that have most to fear from Facebook fraudsters. Because fewer people are likely to suspect a rat, it’s much easier for an evil-minded prankster to damage an average Joe’s reputation with a fake profile. That’s turned Facebook into a site not just for people to make friends and renew old acquaintances but  a potential crime scene where anyone can slaughter a name.

Fortunately, it’s also now legally protected space. In a landmark case in July 2008, the High Court in London ordered Grant Raphael to pay former schoolfriend and business colleague, Mathew Firsht £22,000 (around $36,000) for breach of privacy and libel. Raphael had created a fake Facebook page in Firsht’s name, claiming that he was homosexual and untrustworthy.

Facebook though has the advantage – in security terms, at least – of being at least a little closed. Members are able to restrict their personal information to people they approve, making it slightly harder for identity thieves to copy entirely another person’s life. Most members make use of that barrier on Facebook. Relatively few do on Twitter even though the option is available, allowing anyone to read the details of their personal lives.

Are Porn Bots Picture Thieves?

In practice, that openness might not in itself be a problem. Scammers want to know your bank account details, not what you had for lunch. The real identity threat on Twitter comes from two directions.

The first – and one that’s becoming a growing nuisance on the microblogging site – is from porn twitterers. “Latonya Ditecco,” “luvLorelei395” and “Hubert937” are just three timelines with remarkably similar tweets. At first glance, those tweets appear to be almost natural. Posts like “what are y’all gonna do 4 FathersDay 2morrow…need ideas” don’t stand out as being particularly strange until you realize that exactly the same tweet appears across multiple timelines, and the retweets and rehashed quotes are as meaningless as many that you can find across the site. It’s when they start talking about sex that you know the picture on the profile isn’t of the person typing the messages. More worryingly, while some of those pictures look like they were bought from a kind stock agency for porn sites, others (such as this one) look more like they were lifted from a photo-sharing site. That’s worrying for the people in the pictures who now look like Twitter porn stars.

The other threat though is much simpler and it comes from people impersonating others to benefit from their name brand. That’s not new to Twitter and can sometimes be harmless. Forbes editor Dan Lyons created a Fake Steve Jobs blog to satirize the Apple founder, and Twitter is filled with timelines created in the name of Buffy Summers and other fictional heroes. It’s when those fake timelines pretend to be real and written by other people that the deception is more serious. Even the mainstream media was taken in when someone started tweeting in the name of the Dalai Lama, and news outlets had to issue a stream of corrections when it became clear the timeline was fake.

Again, those aren’t intended to be harmful, even if the effect could be to damage the real person’s brand and credibility. More worryingly though, many of the timelines reported to Twitter’s @spam complain timeline have actually been created by marketers who use the name of well-known Internet sellers to promote their own products. When buyers find that those items are sub-standard, they’ll be complaining to and about the wrong person.

Fortunately, Twitter has been pretty good at responding to identity theft. Its terms make clear that it doesn’t allow name squatting and complaints quickly result in closed timelines. The site’s new Verified Accounts have even made it easy for celebrities to prove that they really are who they say they are, although looking for links to the timeline on the celebrity’s official website can be pretty effective too.

Identity Theft 2.0 then is more complex than the old version. It requires scammers to create entire personalities rather than memorize credit card and social security numbers. And it’s not entirely clear what they can get out of it – other than annoying the person who’s identity they’ve stolen. Pretend to be Zig Ziglar and try to sell your information products on Twitter or Facebook and it won’t take too long before you’re shut down. You won’t have got to swipe someone else’s wife but at least you won’t have been hanged.

The Internet is big. Really, really big. And really, really valuable too. Google has indexed over 40 billion pages and counted more than 1 trillion unique URLs. Estimates of regular users have ranged from 500 million to a billion (although no one really knows how to produce accurate user figures)… and retail sales have been estimated at as much as $178 billion in 2008 alone.

Those are huge figures. The revenues are the kind of money that could make a noticeable hole in the national debt, keep a small bank afloat or even repay Bernie Madoff’s victims several times over. It’s no wonder then that so many businesses have built an online presence, hoping to pick up a slice of those online billions – and make sure that their competitors don’t take a chunk of their offline market share too.

Growth figures certainly appear to make that a sensible decision. The top 500 online retailers enjoyed increased sales of almost 12 percent in 2008. Total US retail sales might have grown by as little as 1.4 percent in the same period. Amazon alone reported an increase in revenues of 18 percent in the first quarter of this year despite the downturn, taking gross income to $4.89 billion and net revenues to $177 million. That’s not bad for a retailer without a single High Street store.

Almost Half of Online Purchases Are Abandoned

But looking at the size of online sales alone misses the bigger picture. While Internet retailing might be weathering the recession better than bricks and mortar stores, it still only makes up around 6.5 percent of total sales. To put it another way, Amazon, which now sells everything from groceries to televisions, isn’t just missing 93.5 of purchases. It doesn’t even have a way to compete for any of those deals directly.

Worse, while Amazon’s size means that it is able to tempt shoppers doing online comparison shopping, its additional logistics expenses can sometimes leave it — and other online retailers — uncompetitive. According to a recent Paypal survey, a full 45 percent of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing their purchase. They walk away when they realize how much they have to add for postage and packing, a figure usually hidden until it’s time to enter their credit card details. If almost half of all shoppers abandoned their carts at the checkout line in bricks and mortar stores, the other half would never be able to reach the cashier.

The size of the opportunity available away from the computer has prompted some online businesses to look offline for growth. Threadless, a t-shirt company that invites designers to submit their designs, started online but opened its first store in Chicago in September 2007.

“Why a store?” the company asks on its site. “A zillion reasons. Most of them revolve around ideas we come up with for giving back to the Threadless community and not having the staff, resources, venue or time to make happen. Ideas like teaching design classes, hosting galleries with Threadless artist’s work, having real-world group critiques and other various events.”

That willingness to offer more than a product — including services that are difficult to deliver online — may be one reason Threadless is still around while other online retailers that expanded offline, such as gift sellers Satinbox, have failed.

Other businesses though are ignoring the Web almost entirely. While it’s difficult to find any business larger than a mom-and-pop hardware store that doesn’t at least have a website, 63 percent of hospitals are said to have “little or no online presence.” That might be sensible. The same survey found that 37 percent of hospitals have “prevalent negative reviews online” suggesting that a dynamic website acts as a magnet for public complaints when what patients really want to know is whether the institution accepts their insurance and how they can reach it.

Press the Flesh, Not Just the Keyboard

Perhaps most tellingly, despite the growth in online networking, despite Facebook’s ability to renew old friendships, LinkedIn’s skill at identifying business contacts, and Twitter’s popularity with middle-aged managers looking for connections, the most valuable networking still takes place at conferences and conventions. Hitting the keyboard might be easy — and useful too — but there’s still nothing that can come close to the value of pressing the flesh in person.

Of course, none of this means that online retailing is overrated. A fifth of whatever retail growth took place last year happened online and there’s every sign that online sales are going to continue to take a larger share of retailing as a whole.

But just as it’s hard to think of a business that can’t benefit from the most basic website, so it’s difficult too to imagine an online company that can’t earn more by looking beyond the Internet. Even sellers of digital products and publishers who earn from online ad revenues can pick up some extra cash, stronger partnerships and new ideas with offline networking. And if a program sells well when downloaded from a website, there’s no reason it won’t sell just as well when burnt onto a disk, packed into a large box and placed on a shelf in a major computer chain.

The challenge though will be getting around the risk and the additional expenses of setting up in the real world. It can cost nothing to launch a website, and a professional site can be created for just a few hundred bucks. Maintenance costs are negligible, marketing expenses are easy to measure and predict, and you don’t have to worry about location. Renting a store, on the other hand, will require months of searching, negotiation, inventory storage and ongoing costs that often bring a company down before it can generate a profit. Even convincing a retailer to hand over a little shelf space can take a great deal of persuasion — and a willingness to take a smaller share of the sales price. Dealing with affiliates is always easier.

But remembering that more than 93 percent of business is being conducted offline should be enough to incentive enough for any entrepreneur to look again at the offline world… and step away from their computer.

Ask most people to describe their ideal job and it’s likely to contain a giant salary, of course, but also lots of responsibility and perhaps most importantly, plenty of creativity. Having the freedom to think for yourself – and be rewarded for it – is priceless.

And one of the advantages of a world in which iPhone apps can let cubicle workers give up the day job is that earning from creativity is easier than ever before. If once imaginative thinkers were restricted to the creative departments of large advertising companies – where they were free to think up catchy slogans for airline companies and sketch storyboards for TV slots – today’s creative types have a giant range of options.

Join a Creative Profession

For conventional creatives, the number of artistic professions has exploded. Walt Disney might have been known for having teams of animators whose job was to draw the same character in minutely different ways (or as the company’s historians have pointed out, simply copy the movements from previous films), but Pixar’s animation team gets to do much more fun things, moving characters around, animating tiny details (like hair) and creating new characters with ease. And animators aren’t restricted to movie companies and television studios. Their skills and imagination are also needed by video game firms, whose products tend to start with movie-style intros and whose characters have to be created and planned, as well as online publishers, music promoters and marketers.

The world of graphic design has become much more exciting too. Image editors with knowledge of Photoshop can now create the kinds of graphics that artists of the past could only dream of. That’s only increased expectations. Back in the old days, it was enough for a weathergirl to physically move sticky, plastic clouds across a map of the country; today, the designers are expected to recreate the changing weather itself, making even the old jobs more fun.

Create Your Own Creative Job

But perhaps the biggest improvement for creative thinkers is that they no longer need to go to interviews and persuade old-style employers to pay them for their new-fangled skills. They can put their imaginations to work, create their own products and make them available for sale without having to be told what to do by a boss.

Online malls such as Zazzle, Cafepress, and for craft-y types, Etsy, have turned the Internet into a giant bazaar for people with enough imagination to come up with new product ideas and the skills to create them.

But while sticking a funky design on a t-shirt and offering it in a Cafepress store might be simple and available to anyone, in practice, it’s the sellers with the most original ideas and the most unique styles that tend to be the most successful. Few sellers on Zazzle, for example, have reported sales of more than $500 a month. Yet, Vlad Gerasimov a Siberian designer, has managed to carve out a niche for himself with a naïve style that’s instantly recognizable and all his own. It’s allowed him to give up his day job (designing software interfaces) and focus on creating wallpapers and images that his fans pay for on a subscription basis.

When creative selling is open to everyone, it’s the market that picks the sellers with the genuinely valuable ideas.

Even eBay is allowing artists to make money from their creations. Instead of  having to lug a portfolio of paintings to a gallery and persuade an owner that their pictures really will sell, artists today can put their creations in a “Direct from the artist” category and offer them to collectors themselves. With over 50,000 works available at any one time, that must make eBay the world’s largest art gallery – even if it’s not the most successful. Gallery pictures might go for thousands of dollars at a time but when you have 49,999 competitors of varying talent just a click away, many artists will be lucky to win more than a two-figure sum.

Get Creative with the Marketing

Unless they extend their creativity from the product itself to the way that they sell it.
This might not be what most people have in mind when they think of being creative. They’d rather be known for designing the iPod than creating the Mac versus PC ads that promote Apple. But creative marketing can be as much fun, as challenging, and the results as measurable (and as satisfying) as coming up with innovative product ideas and styles.

And like creative production, it’s also something that today can be done as easily from a small office – even a home office – as it is do as part of a large corporation. The success of a viral marketing campaign about a product – now recognized as one of the most effective ways of spreading a sales message – depends on the quality of the idea behind it, not the cost involved in creating it. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken ad, for example, was created not by its advertising firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky, but by the Barbarian Group, a smaller agency to which it had outsourced the viral part of the campaign.

Even Vlad Gerasimov, who doesn’t advertise, has built up his following in part by sharing his production tips, making him popular with other designers, and by using a fairly unique subscription model to make sales.

Create a Creative Company

That might offer a clue to what could be the best way to make money out of creativity: create a creative business. That’s going to require a little more than sticking a picture on a t-shirt and uploading the design to Zazzle. It could mean writing a business plan, finding clients, selling your skills, and perhaps at some point, finding other creative types to share the workload. But these days, you can do that creatively too. iJoomla might be a successful software company that creates extensions for Joomla, but it’s also an entirely virtual company with no central office and employees scattered from Los Angeles to Romania and beyond.

When you start to think outside the box, there’s no limit to the way that you can earn.

Usually, Web 2.0 just gets it right. Facebook has brought together old friends and keeps connections alive, blogs have given everyone the power to publish without the need to be a media baron first, and Twitter is now letting Iranian demonstrators bring millions onto the streets and send out information that might just change the government.

And yet, those same tools that have proved so useful for communicating, networking and publishing have also been used for more dubious purposes. Here are a number of ways in which Web 2.0 has gone wrong:

Pool Jumping with Google Earth

According to a story published last year in the UK’s Daily Mail, which might not be the most reliable source, groups of young people in Britain are using Google Earth to identify homes with swimming pools then sending invitations through Facebook groups for impromptu pool parties. The sessions specify a meeting place, a time – usually between midnight and 3am – and mobile telephone numbers for contacting the organizers.

While flash mobs have long been one product of Web 2.0, those gatherings were usually harmless fun that brought like-minded people together. Finding a bunch of people in your swimming pool in the middle of the night and a pile of beer cans in your roses isn’t quite so harmless.

There seems to be little sign that the habit is repeating itself, even as the summer gets under way again. Instead pool-based Facebook groups seem to be largely dedicated to people jumping in with their phones in their pockets. Not quite the way to dive into social media.

Rocket Launching with Google Earth

Trespassing might be naughty but it won’t actually kill anyone. Hamas rocket launchers in Gaza do kill people and they also do it with Google Earth. The BBC has described how computer-savvy militants from Fatah line up targets with Google’s satellite images before sending their rockets into nearby Israeli towns. One racketeer even complained that the map-makers deliberately mask Israeli military installations.

If that is true, it might not be the first time. There have also been reports that Google replaced pictures showing UK forces’ bases in Basra with older images taken before the Iraq conflict after British forces were targeted by Iraqi militants, and terrorists arrested in the US had apparently planned an attack on JFK International Airport using Google Earth.

And you thought Google’s satellite globe was just for looking at the roof of your house.

Divorced by SMS

Ending a relationship is never easy. It starts with “we have to talk” and always seems to end with “it’s not you, it’s me.” Wouldn’t life be easier if you could just send a text message saying, “You’re dumped”?

Easier, but not very nice – unless you happen to live in Dubai, in which case you can not only dump your girlfriend by SMS, you can even divorce your wife. One report even quoted one impatient man who had sent his wife the text message: “Why are you late? You are divorced.”

It’s questionable whether that would stand though. Under Islamic law, the husband has to tell his wife three times that he divorces her for the marriage to have ended – which requires a bit more thumb-work — but it is enough of a phenomenon to have prompted officials to take action. Singapore’s Islamic authorities have banned the practice of divorce by SMS, and while the Malaysian court has sanctioned it, the government there has criticized the practice.

Westerners will have to stick with divorce lawyers.

Texting Bullies

Bullying has been around as long as there have been children, schools and allowances to swipe off the small kids, but until communication became universal, it was usually limited by location. You had to be in the same cubicle as the school bully if he was going to stick your head down the toilet.

Today though, the ability to send messages such as “We are watching you … we are going to kill you … we are going to kill your mum”, as Wired notes, means that the victimization can continue wherever the bully might be and wherever the victim is too.

Even the home no longer offers a safe respite, the distance means that bullying is much easier to do and the knowledge that someone has your personal details makes the attack feel even more intrusive. Wired cites one report of a teenager who committed suicide after receiving 20 abusive messages in half an hour.

Children tend to be pretty creative when it comes to finding ways to do what they want, and that includes bullying. One company though has spotted an opportunity. CellChek is a piece of software, currently in Beta, that is intended to protect children from text bullying as well as adult grooming and offensive online material.

The bullies will have to go back to the bathrooms.

Fired on Twitter

There’s been a lot of talk about how Twitter can find people jobs, connect them to customers and allow their businesses to build brands, form communities and conquer the world. It certainly can do all that, if it’s done right.

But when it’s done wrong, micro-blogging can also have some pretty negative consequences too. When the “theconnor” famously tweeted:

“Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.”

he received a response from another Cisco worker who asked who his hiring manager was. The tweet caused a storm and even produced a dedicated website.

It wasn’t clear whether “Cisco Fatty” did have his job offer rescinded, but he certainly wasn’t the first person to get in trouble for saying something he shouldn’t have done on the Web’s open communication channels. Soren Dayton, a communications officer for John McCain’s presidential campaign, was suspended for tweeting about a video mash-up smearing Barack Obama, and MSNBC reports that a Philadelphia Eagles stadium employee was fired for tweeting that the “Dam Eagles R Retarted!!” [sic].

He might have been a little unlucky to have lost his job for that, but here’s a bunch of people who are lucky to keep their jobs for their daft tweets.

Whenever the going gets tough, tough companies don’t react by getting going. They tell their employees to get going instead. The US economy is said to have already lost some 6 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the largest number of layoffs in a downturn since World War II. Some of those fired workers are finding other jobs, perhaps with less pay and sometimes as a stopgap until something better comes along. Others are taking the opportunity to set up their own businesses or, if the last recession is anything to go by, rebranding themselves as “consultants” – the geek version of what actors call “resting.”

Lots of former workers though are neither collecting unemployment benefits nor looking for new niches in the marketplace. Instead, they’re going back to school. Even as endowments are falling and fees are rising, colleges are reporting an increase in applications, including from people hoping to graduate with new skills just as the economy gets going again.

But while education is always a good thing – and learning beats spending your time in front of daytime TV — going back to school isn’t always a simple option, especially when you’re too settled to uproot easily and you need a flexible schedule to suit family life. According to the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), some four million students have solved that problem by using distance learning, including online courses.

While many of those courses are simply home-based versions of the sorts of classes you can find at any bricks-and-mortar college, others are a bit unusual. Here are some of the strange, valuable and useful classes that you can take from home and without ever seeing the inside of a lecture hall:

Video Game Making

A number of online colleges offer courses in game design but the Game Institute was created specifically to teach wannabe developers how to create games, while allowing students to learn from their own  homes. Classes include foundation studies in programming, modules in C++ for game development, game mathematics and even console engineering – for which you’ll have to bring your own soldering iron and motherboard.

While many online courses suffer from either a lack of accreditation or the kind of low prestige that makes them look less than glowing on a resume, the Game Institute’s knowledge is practical and useful for entrepreneurs. With a foundation package starting at $399, it could also prove to be a bargain when your game hits the top of the iPhone app charts.

Animation

The Game Institute will give developers the technical skills necessary to create games but not everyone has a head for figures. If a return to high school math isn’t your thing — and the modules include refresher courses on the kind of number-crunching you probably wish you’d seen the back of — maybe you can learn something a little more creative. Kaplan University’s online classes include a B.S. in Information Technology/Multimedia & Animation which explains how to blend interactive media with commercial content, as well as teaching game animation and virtual tours. It might not land you a job at Pixar, but it could give you the knowledge to create your own animation studio.

Helping Humanitarian Workers

These aren’t courses for the average redundant developer but they are interesting. The Headington Institute’s online modules are aimed at psychologists who want to help humanitarian workers returning from difficult environments. Classes include “Understanding and coping with traumatic stress”, “On the road again: Coping with travel and re-entry stress”, and “Understanding and Addressing Vicarious Trauma”. Presumably being able to study these fun topics while sitting in your pajamas in your living room is an important part of beating the stress.

And if you were thinking of riding out the recession with a little overseas voluntary work, then a quick look at the content of these courses should do a good job of keeping you at home.

Herbalist

You’ll need to be a psychologist to make use of an education from the Headington’s Institute to heal the world’s helpers. Anyone though can be a herbalist. The Clayton College of Natural Health is accredited by the American Association of Drugless Practitioners and the American Naturopathic Medical Accreditation Board, whoever they are. While that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to finally make your mother proud, call yourself a doctor and start looking for volunteers to practice your neurosurgery techniques, it does mean that the college’s degree-level classes in Holistic Nutrition, Traditional Naturopathy, Herbal Studies and Companion Animals Studies will let you start administering to the sick and trendy. More importantly, you’ll be able to start charging.

Food Studies

Of course, to cure your patients you’ll have to persuade them to drink your herbal mixes. That might be a little easier if you know how to make them look appetizing and taste nice too. The New England Culinary Institute is just one college offering food-related courses. At the moment, you can take an online bachelor’s degree in Hospitality and Restaurant Management but the institute is getting ready to start offering Internet-based classes in Cooking Theory and Food Science and History, Flavor and Culture among others. When they bring their wine-tasting class online, you’ll be able to sit in front of the computer with a bottle of booze and tell people you’re staying in to study.

Public Relations, Law and Business Studies

And if you really want to do something useful, London University is offering an online course in Management with Law, the Robert Kennedy College at the University of Wales provides an online MBA and the University of Phoenix is one site of many that allows online students to take degrees in Public Relations.

But all of those courses are practical and useful, and what’s the point of taking a class like that during a recession?

And it can work. While many apps have been developed by companies rather than individual programmers, there’s no shortage of stories about programmers who have struck it rich enough to give up the day job and dedicate themselves to a life of one-man mobile game-making.

So what are the key ingredients of an app that goes all the way? What sort of decisions does a developer have to make in order to increase the chances of success? And what can programmers learn from the experiences of others?

The Price is Right

Perhaps the biggest decision a programmer will need to make is whether to charge for the app or give it away for free. And if you are going to charge for it, what’s the right price: 99 cents or $899.99?

Surprisingly perhaps, it may well be possible to make money from the advertising on free apps — but only if the app is very successful. According to AdWhirl, a mobile ad network, because each use of an app generates several ad impressions, free applications that make the App Store’s top 100 can generate from $400 to as much as $5000 a day in CPM revenues.

Clearly though, only a small fraction of free apps will make it into the top 100, leaving the rest to pick up cents from each download, instead of the 99 cents (minus Apple’s 30 percent cut) that many paid apps earn.

One solution then is to use the free app not as a way to bring in ad revenues but as a tool to advertise the paid version. Perhaps the most famous success story that used this method is iShoot Lite, an artillery shooting game developed by Sun programmer Ethan Nicholas. After the full version of the game sold only a few downloads, Ethan released a free lite version that offered a limited selection of weapons. Within ten days iShoot Lite was the most popular free app in the App Store. At the same time, boosted by the 13 percent of free users who decided to upgrade, the $2.99 version topped the paid charts, generating almost 17,000 downloads a day. Within a month, Nicholas had netted over $600,000 and was no longer working for Sun. It’s no surprise then that the free app listings are now filled with lite versions of paid games.

Buy While Stocks Last!

Ethan Nicholas didn’t spend a dime on marketing. Once his app was in the charts, its high visibility was enough to keep it there. That’s not always the case though and many developers recommend marketing — even paid advertising — as the most effective way to push a new app. Brook Lennox, for example, has talked about using the iPhone ad networks as a way of promoting his company’s Textfree app. (The lite version of Textfree even integrates ads as a way of both promoting the paid version and recouping some extra revenue).

“Spend $200-$500 and see where it gets you,” he says on his blog. “You can target by country, device, and test several ads at once. Make sure you can track your new users and ranking hourly.”

For those with low budgets — or no budgets at all — reviews can also be helpful. A positive report from a review site like AppCraver or AppStorm can generate some free traffic. Feedback from users though is even more valuable. Buyers do pay attention to the number of stars an app receives in the same way that eBay customers look at buyer reviews.

That opens a couple of opportunities. Although app prices tend to be fairly low, those priced above 99 cents have the freedom to be cut for a limited time, creating a sense of urgency, and — no less importantly — increasing the chances that some of those initial buyers will offer enough reviews to keep the momentum going when the price rises again. Dmitriy Glebenok’s PandoraBox was created specifically to make the most of this opportunity, allowing downloaders to see which apps have recently been reduced in price so that they can snap up a bargain.

The second opportunity is to do a little black hat marketing. Infomedia, creator of perhaps the App Store’s most famous app, iFart Mobile, was accused by makers of rival app Pull My Finger, of placing negative reviews in the App Store. The discord between the competitors eventually led Pull My Finger to sue Infomedia for copyright infringement in its marketing material. Infomedia has counter-sued.

A better option then, is to add viral marketing to static reviews. DataViz, makers of mobile productivity suites, has been using Twitter to keep followers up to date with progress of its iPhone release, and has created a Facebook fan page to respond to customers’ comments. It’s even used giveaways on Twitter to bring new customers in and spread the word about the approaching release.

So pricing is an important part of a successful iPhone app, and it is possible for a free app to generate income, both alone and as a way to promote the full version of an application. Paid advertising on networks like Quattro and Millennial Media can bring rewards, while viral marketing and good reviews are free. Success too brings more success, and nothing generates sales faster than hitting the top of the App Store’s charts.

Perhaps the most important ingredient for an application’s success though is the same as that for any endeavor: you have to like what you’re doing. Ethan Nicholas didn’t set out to create an app that would allow him to say goodbye to Sun. He wanted to create a game that he would enjoy playing. Whether you’re creating something as trivial as The Moron Test or as serious as IRA Pro, create an app that you want to use and you should have the first and most important element for success.

If only. What day jobbers – and new freelancers too — fail to understand is that freelancing is work, and like any work, it comes with difficulties and frustrations, challenges which can, and sometimes even should, drive a freelancer back to the safety of the 9-5.

There are no figures that describe the numbers of people hanging up their lances and heading back to the office, but only around 48 percent of respondents in some surveys indicated that they would even consider telecommuting. A similar number said that they would like to stick to the day job but with flexible hours. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that despite the improvement in communications, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rate of self-employment has remained relatively steady at between 7-9 percent of the workforce since the 1970s.

Freelancing is Lonely

Perhaps the regular workers know something we don’t. Freelancing, after all, isn’t the same as retiring. For one, working for yourself can be anti-social. While wireless connections in cafes and libraries allow digital nomads to escape the home office, neither is a particularly social space.

The longest conversation you’re likely to have in a Starbucks is trying to explain how you’d like your green tea frapuccino.

It’s the need to speak to someone other than a barista that has led to the growth of co-working sites. But these can be expensive, typically charging from $25 a day to over $500 a month. That’s less than the cost of renting an office, but it’s a lot of money to buy new friends, even if you do end up liking most of them. A regular job would give you that social life for free.

Nor is there any guarantee that you would have anything in common with your fellow Jelly workers – except the lack of a regular paycheck.

Of course, for many freelancers, and wannabe freelancers, it’s precisely that financial instability that’s often the biggest anchor pulling them back to a cubicle. Dan Florio, a freelance developer, has talked of trying to build up enough savings to give him a three-month buffer if all of his clients disappeared at the same time.

“Even when I was just starting as a freelancer I didn’t have any trouble finding work so I doubt if I’ll ever come close to needing that much of a buffer but it certainly helps…” he says on his blog.

In practice, low income – and no income – tends to be the biggest concern at the beginning of a freelancing career. Over time, a growing portfolio makes new work easier to find, word-of-mouth brings in business for no extra effort, and regular clients give income levels at least a firm foundation with the occasional jobs topping up the rest.

The More You Do, The More You Earn

But even for established freelancers, the fear of losing everything never goes away, and that’s one of the reasons that the self-employed often have far worse bosses than those they fired. When you have no contract, no right to severance pay, no benefits and an awareness that plenty of other people could do the job almost as well – and that they’re no more than a website away – it’s hard to say no to a client even when their demands are unreasonable and your book is already looking fuller than you’d like.

And, of course, the more billable work you can squeeze into a month, the more money you can expect to take home at the end of it, a double-edged bonus. Without a plan and plenty of self-discipline, freelancers can easily find themselves working longer hours than they used to – and without many of the benefits of those long hours. After all, when a regular jobber stays late at the office, they’re looking for more than overtime. They expect their commitment to be noticed and rewarded with more responsibility, a grander title and higher pay overall. While income is most new freelancers’ first concern, established freelancers often find themselves wrestling with the question of “What next?” At least one developer has reported doing the same kinds of tasks after three years that he had been doing when he started. It was one of the reasons he cited for giving up freelancing.

And that’s perhaps the biggest reason that freelancing isn’t for everyone, and it’s the ultimate way to know whether it’s right for you.

You can replace the lost sociability with an active extra-curricular life, one filled with classes, sports, activities and new friends.

You can get your boss under control by placing firm limits on the time you stop working in the evenings, and steering clear of the computer at the weekends.

You can even learn to live with an unstable income with a bit of fiscal discipline and a base of regular clients whose repeat jobs pay the mortgage and fill the grocery cart.

But to freelance in the long term, you also need to know not just what you can do but what you’d like to do with your skills. You need to know where you want your career path to take you, and what you need to do to get there as you build experience and knowledge.

Freelancing might be the ultimate ambition for many workers but ambitious workers won’t just need to be driven and focused if they’re to achieve their goals. They also need to be their own career managers.

The alternative is to find a boss to do it for you.

When Al Gore gets to wave an Oscar for a film about drowning polar bears, and Richard Branson announces that he’s committing all of the proceeds from Virgin Atlantic to the search for alternative fuels (a commitment said to be worth around $3 billion over ten years), you know going green is a serious business. And as it turns out, it’s good for business too. Although some of the steps that an entrepreneur can make to green their company costs money, most save cash.

What would once have looked like parsimonious penny-pinching now makes a company look with-it and generous to the planet. Here are 38 ways to give your business a touch of green.

1.    Skip the Business Travel
When the leaders of America’s motor industry flew in their private jets to Washington to beg for a handout, the waste and luxury didn’t do their claims of penury much good. Perhaps if they had bought HP’s Halo video-conferencing system, they might have had a better press. But they wouldn’t have needed to splash out even that far.  ACT Conferencing enables green, virtual, long-distance meetings (you can even calculate the amount of carbon dioxide you’ll be saving) and Webex lets former business travelers pack an entire conference into their mobile phones. So much for air miles.

2.    Commute with Muscle Power
You might be able to skip the trip to Shanghai with a virtual conference but you still have to get to the office in the morning. Instead of sitting in traffic though, give your legs a workout. Buy a bike and take the trails or plug in your iPod and walk. It might take you a little longer but it will be better for your health – and the planet’s.

3.    Take Public Transport
Unless, of course, by the time you get there it will be time to come home. If walking or cycling are out of the question then take another look at public transport. Compared to private vehicles, public transport is said to produce 95 percent less carbon monoxide and almost 50 percent less carbon dioxide for every passenger mile traveled. And if the weirdo sits next to you, you can just change seats.

4.    Make the Company Fleet Hybrid
Despite the benefits of cycling, walking and bussing though, people still tend to prefer traveling in their own cars. Better still, they prefer traveling in their company cars. If you get to make the purchasing decisions about the corporate fleet then at least go for hybrid. Your employees will still get to drive around but the fuel costs will be far lower, and when the car carries your logo, everyone will know you care.

5.    Work from Home
In fact, the only thing better than driving a company hybrid car to work is not going to work at all. Work from home – or allow your employees to do so – and you’ll win all round. Your employees will love the fact that they don’t have to commute, you’ll get to win better loyalty with improved conditions and you’ll still be saving the planet. If you worry it might not work for your business, try it once a week and check the difference in productivity. Even just one day a week will cut the car pollutants by 20 percent and make your workers feel they have a longer weekend.

6.    Use Recycled Paper
The easiest step to greening your office is to make sure that the paper you use is recycled. That’s simple enough when you’re only talking about printer paper but most offices – even home offices – use paper in all sorts of different ways. Business cards can be made of recycled materials, as can disposable towels, toilet paper and canteen napkins.

7.    Recycle
There’s a good chance you’re doing this anyway, especially if local laws require you to do so. But make it easy for any employees to recycle -and for you not to cheat – by placing different bins in the office. And include one for batteries too. Because they’re only thrown out occasionally, they often get forgotten. When you’ve got lots of people working in one space though, you might find the bin fills up very quickly, preventing the odd AA from slipping into the garbage.

8.    Raise the A/C
Every degree that you raise your air conditioning level leads to savings of between 3-5 percent in energy costs. You’ll barely notice a couple of degrees more but saving 10 percent of your air conditioning bill will make a difference to your business’s expenditures, and the planet too.

9.    Cut the Packaging
Pick up an individually-wrapped apple in a grocery store and there’s little you can do but gnash your teeth in rage. Unless you create products too. In that case, keep the packaging to the minimum needed to attract eyes, and give the wrapper a second use. The box for this bird table, for example, doubles as a cardboard mobile.

10.    Check the Home Office Insulation
Garages are made for parking cars not for use as offices – and unlike home office workers, cars don’t needed to be kept warm with heaters in the winter. That means they’re not always properly insulated and sealed. The amount you’ll save by insulating properly will depend on the size of the space and how you do it. Here’s one equation that might help you to figure it out.

11.    Get an Energy Audit
An energy auditor will review your home or office, looking for leaks and spotting opportunities for greater efficiency. You can bring in a pro or you can even do it yourself. The government will help.

12.    Know your Carbon Footprint
An energy audit will show you how you can improve. Calculating your carbon footprint though will tell you why you should improve. You’ll have to do a bit of number-crunching but there are plenty of calculators available to help you. Just try not to be too shocked at the result.

13.    Go Solar
One of the best ways to save energy is to use the free, renewable kind. While plenty of homes in sunny places now use solar panels to heat the water, it’s also possible to charge your mobile device just by opening up the solar sheets. Unless you do a lot of phone-talking, you won’t save a huge amount but every little counts.

14.    Grab Some Wind Power
Your neighbors might not like it, but who’s asking them? Putting a windmill on your property could reduce your energy bills by as much as 80 percent. Unfortunately, this isn’t a matter of adding a little plastic fan to your garden. Working windmills are big. But if your business is out in the wilds and you have the space, you might almost be able to get off the grid.

15.    Stock a Green Canteen
The fridges in workplace canteens often contain something green but usually it’s just the mayonnaise left by the long-gone graphic designer. The food you supply your staff though can be good for your workers and good for the environment too. Next time you fill up the cookie jar or buy a bag of coffee save the world  by heading for the organic nibbles and the sustainable beans.

16.    Create an Office Garden
And what could make for a greener kitchen than tea leaves picked straight from the office garden or tomatoes plucked from shrubbery. Forget about planting a ficus or watering the spider plant. Load up on plants you can eat. You can’t more local or organic than the products of your windowbox.

17.    Wait for the Dishwasher to Fill
Buying a better grade of snack will cost you money – although your workers will thank you for it – but improving your efficiency will save you money. Whether you have a dishwasher in the office kitchen or use the one sitting in the home office, don’t run it half-empty. Waiting until you’ve got enough dirty plates to fill it completely will save you water and electricity.

18.    Boil only the Water you Need
And that’s true too of your kettle. You might need steady injections of caffeine to stop you falling asleep at the keyboard but if you boil enough water for four cups every time you need one then halving the amount will give you – and your energy costs – an important discount. You also won’t have to wait as long for your beverage.

19.    Replace your Boiler
Boilers are said to account for about 60 percent of domestic CO2 carbon emissions. While replacing your old boiler will cost you some up-front cash, you should be able to recoup the money within three to five years. With the right heating controls, you could cut your energy bills by as much as 40 percent – and you still won’t have to wash in cold water.

20.    Check the Energy Star Ratings
If you’re considering buying a new fridge (or any other appliance) either for your office or your home, you might be thinking about size, reliability and appearance. But look too at its energy star ratings. They’ll tell you how much energy the item sucks in – and how much you can save by buying an uglier – but more efficient – model.

21.    Green your Cleaning
Cleaning fluids combine all sorts of dangerous chemicals which are hazardous to the environment – especially water systems – and sometimes to the people using them. There are planet-friendly cleaning fluids available and owners of home offices can even   make their own (vinegar seems to make most things shine.) For large offices though, the government has kindly provided a Green Cleaning Pollution Prevention Calculator that should make your janitor happy.

22.    Use Biodegradable Garbage Bags
And if you’re going to be tossing out the old cleaning materials then make sure you use a biodegradable garbage bag. These break down in a matter of months (so don’t leave them in the bin too long), freeing up space in the landfill and preventing the planet becoming clogged with long sheets of black plastic.

23.    Sponsor a Non-Profit
Most of the ways to green your business involve changing a few habits or swapping some appliances for more efficient versions. But sponsoring the activities of an environmental group allows you to help preserve the ecosystem and win some valuable publicity too.

24.    Make Coupon Deals with Vegetarian Restaurants
Many businesses choose to make life a little more comfortable for their employees by negotiating discount rates from local restaurants. But animal farming, with its use of feedlots and chemicals, and its production of boatloads of manure and cow flatulence, is more damaging to the climate than the entire transport industry combined. Going veggie will improve your health, reduce animal suffering and it will be good for the planet too. And making coupon deals with local vegetarian restaurants will give your workers a reason to cut the meat consumption as well.

25.    Make your Gifts Organic
Giving gifts to clients, suppliers, employees and even outsourced staff is a good way to cement loyalty and give your business a firmer base. Presents show that you care and that you appreciate the recipient. A gift of something green and organic, such as a fruit basket will make your holiday list doubly generous.

26.    Collect Rainwater
You might not want to drink it – although depending on the materials used to capture it, you could – but collecting rainwater isn’t as hard as it sounds. It would certainly help lower your utility bills and in areas like California with serious water problems, home and office water capture could go a long way to solving the problem. And if you’re like Tank Town, a manufacturer of rainwater collection equipment, you could even improve on Pepsi and Coca Cola, and sell it pure.

27.    Drink Tap Water
But don’t sell it, because whether you choose to drink the stuff that falls out of the sky or not, it is worth ditching the bottled water. The liquid that comes out of the tap is usually perfectly drinkable, even if it’s often tastier with a filter. Dropping the bottle will save on plastics and transportation.

28.    Ditch the Halogens
Halogen lamps might be low-voltage and easy to control with dimmer switches, but they’re not very efficient, producing more heat than traditional incandescents.  Measured in lumens, a measurement of light produced per watt, halogens only produce 15 lumens per watt, just five more than incandescent bulbs. Compact fluorescent bulbs create 50 to 60 lumens, and fluorescent tubes 100 lumens.

29.    Power Down
According to one estimate, the typical American home contains around 20 electrical ‘vampires’ – appliances that remain on standby even when they’ve been turned off. Those appliances, including computers and television screens, together cost the household around $200 a year. You might not want to unplug your fridge every night but you can ditch the screensaver and save power by powering down completely at the end of the day.

30.    Refurbish Rather than Renew
Recycling your garbage might be an old and easy standard, but how about your office furniture? Or someone else’s? Just because a desk chair has lost a wheel or torn the upholstery doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. Either take it to be repaired or save some cash – and some resources – by buying used.

31.    Buy Quality
If you are going to buy new though, buy the best you can afford. That’s always sound economic advice anyway but it’s also good ecological advice. The better the item, the longer it’s likely to last and the less often you’ll have to throw things away.

32.    Buy Local
Ideally, the best computer or office desk will be made at a workshop within walking distance of your office and be entirely constructed of recycled parts. In practice, that’s not going to be too likely, leaving you to weigh up the benefits of paying for long-lasting quality against the advantages of lower transportation costs. Buy a good computer monitor, but shop for the canteen veggies in the farmer’s market.

33.    Quiz your Suppliers
When it comes to greening your own business, you get to make all the decisions. But what about your suppliers? As a customer, you have some influence over their actions too. Ask about their energy efficiency and in particular about the greenness of the products you buy from them. Use your authority to help them create a green business too.

34.    Go Digital
The paperless office was first mentioned in a BusinessWeek article back in 1975. We’re still not there. Companies still insist on sending and receiving faxes, printing contracts and producing paper goods, even though much of it is unnecessary. Faxes today can be both sent and received online, signatures added electronically, and much of the documents passed around today could easily by distributed by PDF and read on screens and mobile devices. Print your receipts but the look to keep everything else digital.

35.    Ditch the Junk Mail
And that includes your direct mail leaflets too. They might bring in a lead for every couple of hundred pieces delivered but there are so much easier ways of finding new clients than stuffing everyone’s mailbox. And no, that doesn’t mean spam. Even AdWords is more cost-effective than direct mail – and it doesn’t cost trees.

36.    Print on Both Sides
If you are going to print though, then at least do it smart. Use both sides of the paper. Most decent printers these days allow for double-sided printing, and the savings – fifty percent of your paper bill – make the search for the next page worthwhile. Just be sure to include page numbers to make the paging easy to follow.

37.    Block the Toilet
Not completely, of course, but just a little. Dropping a plastic container filled with stones into the toilet reservoir can reduce the amount of water used with each flush by as much as four liters. That’s a huge saving, especially in an office filled with regular coffee drinkers.

38.    Buy Carbon Offsets
There are some things you’ve just got to do though. Even with a windmill, solar panels, digital products and a half-blocked toilet, you’re still going to be producing waste, burning fuel and degrading the planet a little. But you can make up for it by buying offsets to your carbon footprint. The Carbon Fund has programs for individuals and businesses.

When Steve Jobs pulled a Macbook Air out of a manila envelope at MacWorld 2008 it was a seminal moment. Not only did the new machine have the usual Apple-sexy design and must-have looks that have been thrilling fanboys even since before the birth of the first iPod. It was also incredibly light yet still feature-heavy. Jobs showed that an office was no longer a place where you can find an envelope; an envelope was now capable of holding an entire office.

It’s a revolution whose effects can be seen in cafés across the country. Wherever coffee is poured, croissants are served and wi-fi is delivered for no additional charge, tables are full of laptops stuffed with professional software and manned by tech types who are writing code, creating designs or typing emails. They might not be doing it on Macbook Airs, but they’re not doing it in company offices either.

They’re also not doing it in company. Today’s freelancers might have little need of a corporate parking space, a suit or a cubicle but everyone needs social interaction, the inevitable bonus — together with office politics and juicy gossip — that comes with the traditional workspace.

Freelancing with Friends

That’s the addition that co-working is supposed to deliver. The practice is believed to have started in early 2006, when roommates Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford invited their freelancing friends to work together at their apartment. Jelly, as they called the meetup, has now become a regular event taking place at venues from Beijing to Bangalore that allow freelancing types to meet, chat and work in a social environment. Independent workers can keep the “free” part of freelancing but still enjoy the banter that makes office working bearable.

One of Jelly’s first attendees was Tony Bacigalupo, a work-at-home project manager for Desktop Solutions.

“Working from home was awesome, until it started to drive me crazy,” he told us. 
“I needed to get out of the house and work alongside other people, and figured there were other people out there in the same position.

“After attending my first event, I was blown away by the great people I worked alongside. I was hooked. Started going to every Jelly I could.”

Jelly only happened once every two weeks. Tony though worked every day so when he learned of a new coworking community which would always be open, he became one of the group’s leaders. CooperBricolage met for a month in an East Village café, but it quickly became clear that there was a need for a dedicated co-working space in Manhattan to supplement the one that had already opened in Brooklyn.

New Work City opened on Varick Street at the beginning of November, 2008, and is now used by between 40 and 50 people a month. Most are members, paying monthly fees that range from $25 for access one day a month to as much as $550 for a key granting access 24/7, storage space, a mailing address and priority use of the conference room. A number of the site’s users are also occasional visitors or people from out of town who pay a $25 daily rate. Most are tech types, developers, designers, consultants, startups and managers who get to enjoy fast wireless Internet and a seat at a desk or shared table.

Membership fell when the site opened just as the economy crashed but newly laid-off workers are also coming to New Work City. Many of them, Tony believes, may choose not to return to the office and full-time employment at all.

Coworking’s Extra Value

The fees then don’t seem to be putting people off even though they make Starbucks’ three dollar coffees — with a table and next door’s Internet access thrown in for nothing — look like good value. New Work City is profitable. No one earns a salary for running the place but the fees bring in more revenue than New Work City spends and Tony is looking at ways to scale up so that it can employ staff.

That suggests a dedicated co-working space does deliver something valuable that’s missing even in a coffee house filled with freelancers.

“Context,” explains Tony. “When working in a cafe, you might be working alongside other people, but you don’t have any good way of connecting with these people. Also, many freelancers and entrepreneurs could use better resources than a typical cafe setup: a faster, more consistent Internet connection, conference room, printing capabilities, a desk, etc.”

Presumably though, those connections also brings distractions. Offices have doors and even cubicles have walls, allowing employees to focus on productivity without being tempted to look at the viral video being watched on the screen next to them. Tony concedes that coworking can indeed bring diversions but points out that the people who come to New Work City are hard-working types who are serious about what they do. They have fun, he argues, but their industriousness is inspiring and that in itself can help productivity.

More importantly, the knowledge possessed — and shared by people at the same table — can open whole new opportunities.

“[D]istractions tend to be of a productive slant — in a given day of coworking, one might easily come home having learned about a new site or project or having discussed a new idea that helps them in a way they didn’t expect,” says Tony. “We call the phenomenon ‘accelerated serendipity.’”

Getting the most out of a coworking space then means doing more than turning up and staying longer than you can sit comfortably in a café with one cup of coffee and something sweet and flaky. It means talking with the other members, helping to plan and run events, contributing to improving the workspace and swapping ideas and knowledge.

It means helping to create a community out of the disparate workers who fill the space.

“Over time, the value of the community becomes really irreplaceable,” says Tony. “For collaboration, sharing knowledge, networking, and even just for social needs, the coworking space brings people together to fill those roles.”

You’ve mastered your niche and moved your business from the start-up phase to a much more stable phase.

And that’s when the trouble begins.

It’s hard enough to identify a niche that looks promising, and it takes time and effort to conquer it so that you become the leading expert in the field. But once that happens, all sort of problems can crop up that can threaten your hard-earned position.

Competition is Flattery

You get competition for one. The main benefit of targeting a niche is that the competition is smaller than you might run across in larger markets. But once other people can see that you’re making money, they’ll want some of the action too.

This is what happened in the online dating market. Once it became clear that the concept worked – that people were willing to pay a monthly fee to send emails to other singles – everyone piled in until there were hundreds of sites offering exactly the same service. Some of them were smart and focused on their own niches, such as JDate, for Jewish singles or MillionaireMatch, for well-to-do couples. But many others such as DatingClub.com, stayed general and failed to survive.

And that’s the good thing about dealing with the competition that follows in your wake – stay alert and you should stay ahead. Match.com wasn’t just one of the first Internet dating sites, it’s also now the market leader. The same is true of Amazon.com, a pioneer in online retailing, and now the first stop for many people looking to shop online despite the huge numbers of alternatives.

While competition will follow a niche master then (removing one of the biggest advantages that a niche offers) the mimicry isn’t just flattery, it’s often also recognition that the company’s the leader – and likely to stay that way.

Expectations rise too when you’ve mastered your niche. People will believe that you understand everything there is to know about your topic, especially when that topic is small and narrow, like Yosemite rock-climbing or the power of communities. This is always going to a problem when the company is a one-man band rather than a group of bright individuals. Professional speakers like Paul Hartunian, a publicity expert, can expect constantly to be asked questions about their subject, and some of those questions are going to be headscratchers.

It’s always going to be impossible for one person to know everything there is to know about a field, especially when that field is constantly changing.

While that can bring a threat of disappointment – and worse, a sense that the expert isn’t such an expert after all – it’s also an opportunity. One approach taken by a number of bloggers is to portray themselves not as people who have more knowledge than their peers but merely as people who share their knowledge with their peers. That can still create a leadership position within a niche but it also makes the expert a kind of über-user. It’s an approach which enhances trust and for businesses, which try to do the same thing through careful branding, keeps a group of customers centered on a single supplier.

What Do I Do Now?

The worst danger that can come from mastering your niche though is not knowing what to do next. That can happen when you feel you’ve reached the goal you’ve set yourself when you started, and find that you’re drifting. It could have happened to Amazon.com when it became the world’s biggest book retailer but it didn’t because the company had different goals at different levels. While it focused on books initially, it also had the aim of selling a variety of other goods. And once it had mastered that position, it began to describe itself not as a retail firm but as a logistics firm, handling storage and delivery for other companies.

And perhaps that’s the most unexpected consequence of mastering your niche: it gives you strength to expand until eventually, you’re no longer a niche player but a general player in a much bigger market. Virgin, for example, might have started as a music retailer but it now has fingers in pies as big as planes and trains.

Clearly, that’s not going to be the result of conquering every niche – and describing that sort of success as trouble could be a bit of a stretch – but all of these big achievements started as attempts to rule one small area. That’s not a bad place for anyone to start.

If prizes were ever given for poorly-coined terms, “freelance” might well have to hire a writer to put together its acceptance speech. Few of us carry lances around these days and if the “free” refers to anything, it’s more likely to be the amount clients expect to pay for their products than the freedom that should come with being free of a boss.

In practice, freelancers just have lots of bosses, multiple deadlines (sometimes in the same day) and, thankfully no shortage of work.

That might sound surprising. After all, there’s no shortage of people hoping to replace the 9-5 with a 10-4 routine of café-hopping, down-dressing and downstairs commutes. eLance alone, a site that lets freelancers bid on gigs, has more than 110,000 freelancers on topics from Web and Programming to Engineering and Manufacturing.

Six-Figure Freelancers

And yet, the top earners regularly generate six-figure sums, amounts that many freelancers might have struggled to earn in a regular job.

Or perhaps it only looks that way. One of the biggest untold secrets of freelancing is that some freelancers freelance for… well, other freelancers.

When a good freelancer finds work plentiful and time short, a solution is to switch sides, become a client and pass the work on, paying a slightly lower fee and pocketing the difference.

Clearly, there’s a danger here. You’re paying less so there’s a chance you’re going to be receiving less. The last freelancer in the chain also knows that it’s not his name on the line, so he has less to lose by turning in lower-grade work. Even if he loses a client by not being as careful as usual, he might also have damaged a more powerful competitor. And the time it takes you to correct lower quality work and bring it up to scratch, might not be worth the small profit you generate from the work itself.

There are methods though that freelancers can use to keep their own freelancers motivated and working at their best.

One is not to be too possessive. There is a danger that if the second freelancer knows who the client is, he’s going to cut out the middle man, head straight for the client and steal the show. That’s possible, but it doesn’t happen often. Most people are well-behaved, and even those without ethics would have to think twice about risking a certain income for only the possibility of earning the same or only a slightly higher income directly from the client.

Usually, it’s a risk worth taking because understanding exactly what the client is trying to do lets the freelancer see the big picture. It provides context, a feel for the client’s tastes and preferences, and — most importantly – a sense that their work has meaning.

It takes a certain type of freelancer to produce work without being interested in how that work is going to be used. In general, those are the sort of freelancers you want to avoid working with.

“I Did That!”

Asking your helper for advice can have a similar effect. When one freelancer outsources work to another, the relationship between them changes. The worker with the money has more power than the worker who wants to earn. But at every other time, neither has any power over the other and they compete as peers, respecting each other’s work and status. Keeping some of that respect in the freelancer-freelancer relationship can prove to be very rewarding too. It helps the supplier feel invested in the project, especially when their opinions are listened to and acted on.

Being able to say “I did that” – even if you’re only saying it to yourself – can be a better motivator even than money.

Not that money isn’t important, and this is perhaps one of the hardest things about paying other freelancers. Because the freelance world is so competitive, there’s very little room for a winning bid to include someone else’s pay. The more generous you are though, the more the supplier is going to feel that his work is valued and that you’re hiring him not to make a profit – although you should be doing that – but because you just can’t take on all this work yourself.

Again, it’s always more comfortable to feel that you’re lending a hand rather than just renting yourself out, even if you’re actually doing both.

Praise though is free and yet it’s oddly rare in the freelance world. We expect our work to be well-received, and we’re always more interested in the checks and the Paypal receipts than the kind words and slaps on the back. But it is still amazing how much being told that your work is good can raise your motivation. Being generous with the compliments can do the same thing for your own freelancers – and it’s cheaper than paying more.

Freelancing is a tricky business and few things are harder than finding good help that you can rely on. When you need it and you find it, it’s worth getting the most out of it.

It’s a thought that would once have occurred to only a few people — writers maybe, who need little more than Word, a telephone and an Internet connection to churn out their texts, and graphic designers, who are happy anywhere they have a Mac, an Adobe suite and a place to show off their creative coolness.

All of them at some point would have had that killer thought: “I could be doing this at home.”

They would have realized that actually they don’t need the firm’s computer. They don’t need the company of the co-worker in the cubicle next door, and they certainly don’t need the morning commute.

They could sit at home – or better still in a café – work at their own pace, at the times that suit them best and send over the completed work when they’re done.

It’s a thought that’s apparently been spreading. Freelance sites like eLance and RentaCoder are now packed with tech types who have realized that they too can have a home office, a regular seat at Starbucks and a nocturnal schedule if they want.

It’s the Freedom of Freelancing that Matters

It’s a very different way of working, a method that swaps the security of a fixed monthly salary for the fear of losing a client, but in return delivers pay that’s directly linked to the amount of work completed and the freedom to knock off when you want.

And it’s the freedom that’s the thing. Freedom from the boss. Freedom to plan your day. Freedom to take control over your life without having to ask anyone’s permission first.

So why then did Odysseas Tsatalos and Stratis Karamanlakis, two engineers who wanted to collaborate on a project while one was in the US and the other in Greece, create oDesk?

At first glance, oDesk looks like yet another freelance site, a place where buyers post jobs and providers from Michigan to Mumbai bid to see who’s prepared to do it for the smallest bag of peanuts. It appears to be exactly the sort of service that eLance, with its critical mass of providers, has been squishing faster than Bill Gates has been swatting media player makers.

But it isn’t. It’s different. It’s the freedom of freelancing combined with the control of Big Brother. Providers have to log in before they start work and oDesk records the amount of time they spend online, sending screenshots back to the buyer every ten minutes to prove they’re being productive. Each week, the buyer receives a timelog allowing them to compare the amount billed to the amount of work completed.

“oDesk allows managers to visually track and verify all work performed through its web-based collaboration tools,” explains Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk. “This approach makes remote work relationships as reliable and open as working in the same physical office. The transparency that oDesk brings helps to build trust quickly and it enables better collaboration, much like managing by walking around.”

It sounds like a dream for buyers and a nightmare for providers. And yet, freelancers are lining up to clock in. The site, which was launched in 2004 with support from Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners, Sigma Partners and DAG Ventures, now has around 150,000 providers and posts 2,500 new jobs every week. Much of that work is are tech-related. Software programming, Web development, graphic design, online research, virtual assistance and technical writing are the most popular services requested.

But here’s the thing: according to a totalizer on the home page, those jobs have paid out more than $52 million. The average value of a job posted on oDesk is around $5,000, much higher than the three-figure sums usually exchanged on eLance.

You Can Throw Small Projects over the Wall

That’s not because the buyers are generous sorts, willing to dig deeper than they need to. It’s because the jobs themselves are bigger and more likely to be open-ended. oDesk works because it’s not so much a freelance site that helps independent workers find projects; it’s a service that allows virtual workers to form teams over distance.

“[F]or small projects where requirements are fixed and firm… you can get comfortable throwing work over the wall with the risk of not knowing where things stand, but most oDesk work isn’t like that.” explains Gary. “Most oDesk work is long-term and it often involves close collaboration among people that have never met in person and are hundreds, if not thousands, of miles apart… We enable companies to maintain control and build true online global teams that work much like a local team.”

The hourly pay model means that projects can grow and blend into new work without the complaints of mission creep familiar to freelancers or the hassle of renegotiation. Buyers can be certain they’re only paying for the amount of time actually worked while providers have a reason to keep one eye on the clock and stay productive. Some providers apparently have picked up so much work that they’ve become buyers themselves, building their own virtual teams and outsourcing their work openly so that the client can hire a complete virtual tech company.

There used to be a time when an employee starting with a new company could feel that he had a job for life. That employment model has now gone the way of office ashtrays and female secretaries who take dictation. Loyalty from each side is now only as deep as the next job offer or the next recession. But freelancing – the hi-tech answer to job insecurity — might be changing too. While it’s still possible to work by project, it’s also becoming increasingly possible to work from home while still being temporarily employed by a single company, even if that employer is on the other side of the globe.

It’s a new way to work from home but with the boss just a ten-minute screenshot away, it doesn’t leave much of the “free” in freelancing.

We’re all in favor of niches. They’re very useful ways to start out in business, find your feet and build a foundation before expanding into different areas. They make the first steps easier but they don’t make the very first step easier: you still have to choose the right niche.

Perhaps the most tempting mistake to make is to leave the niche too big. Create a role-playing video game, for example, and you’ll find yourself competing against World of Warcraft, a thankless challenge. Create a role-playing game for people who like to cast their spells in teams instead of alone though, as the makers of Warhammer have done, and you’ll stand a better chance of staying in the fight and surviving long enough to take on the leader once you’ve grown stronger.

But there is a second mistake you can make when choosing a niche, and that’s leaving it too small. Make that error and you might not be squeezed entirely out of business by a threatened competitor but you will be limiting your income and making future growth harder.

So how can you tell whether you’ve chosen a niche that’s too small or just right?

What are your Customers’ Names?

One of the most obvious signs that your niche is uncomfortably tight is that you can name your customers. This happens a lot on blogs and websites. Although sites often have a small group of readers who leave more comments than others, when you see the same names turning up time after time in response to your articles – and almost no other names – that’s a pretty good sign that your site has become a clique rather than an open club.

Ideally, a website will have a broad base of users and a few leading followers who shape the post-article debate. When your readers are few but dedicated, you’ll struggle to expand and to make sales.

The same is true of businesses. Plenty of slightly nerdy entrepreneurs have paid their bills by opening comic stores; few have managed to do it though by opening comic stores dedicated solely to Spiderman.

The Bottom of the Barrel

Talking to a devoted choir can get dull but another sign that your niche is too small is far more painful: you run out of ideas. Again, on a website, that’s particularly acute — and easy to spot. If after just a few months, you’re scratching your head and wondering what topics to discuss that you haven’t written about already, then you’ve probably narrowed down the potential list of subjects too finely. And that’s dangerous.

When you find yourself having to dredge the bottom of the barrel of your ideas to keep your blog or your website ticking over, it won’t be long before even your most dedicated of minority followers start to feel that you’ve got nothing left to offer them. A website that started with so much enthusiasm and picked up a great reaction can soon fizzle out in disappearing users and irregular posts.

Again, the same can happen in business. One of the necessities for commercial success is constant innovation. If you don’t offer something new, your competitors certainly will. Choose a niche that leaves little room for reinvention though and it won’t be long before your market is saturated. You’ll make a lot of customers very happy in the beginning but once they’ve left, you’ll have no one left to replace them. It’s why specialist used record stores do well for a while (or used to until digital music killed the disc) but then struggle once the fans have loaded up on their favorite songs – and dismissed the owner as a sell-out for trying to expand his range.

A third sign that a niche is too narrow is perhaps the most overlooked but it’s also one of the most important: the advertising is difficult. It’s a problem that works in both directions. Websites with narrow niches struggle to win relevant ads even from services with a tail as long as Google’s AdSense. Without those relevant ads — or with just a small group of advertisers to call on – advertising income is always going to be small.

Similarly, with just a few relevant places to advertise, businesses with tight niches will either have to cope with low conversion rates or spread their advertising narrowly. Either way, the result will be slow, expensive growth.

The correct response to all of these signs, of course, is to expand the niche. That has to be done carefully so that you don’t lose your core audience — some of whom are likely to be disappointed at the influx of new community members anyway – and it has to be done in the right direction so that you don’t find yourself in another tight corner. A better solution is to choose the right-sized niche in the first place.

It might not have struck you yet, but you can feel it getting closer. It’s one thing to hear about the credit crunch on the news and see the stock footage of Detroit’s production lines, now running on government loans and a promise to build cars that run on recycled sunflowers. It’s quite another when a friend at Sun tells you he just got his P45 or an old classmate asks if there are any jobs going at your place.

If you still haven’t had one of those conversations, expect one soon. According to one outplacement service, the tech sector lost just under 187,000 jobs over the last year, three quarters of them vanishing in the second half of 2008 alone. Sun has already sent home 6,000 of its workers, Microsoft has slashed 5,000 (hopefully, most of them from the team that created Vista) and even Google is said to have discovered that the Googleplex has an exit as well as an entrance, even if it is focusing on support staff – at least for now.

So what do you do when a friend tells you that they have free time and an updated resume?

You can sympathize, of course, and you can make an extra effort to meet when they invite you to join them for a cheap lunch. Saying that you’d love to but you’re super-busy at work is only going to make them feel worse. But there are practical steps you can take to help too.

Make Introductions, not Recommendations

It’s times like these that those social networking sites start to show their value. For years, we’ve been told about how LinkedIn is going to revolutionize job-seeking and how Facebook will make maintaining contacts more powerful than a giant pile of business cards. The ability to see just who knows whom — and how many steps you have to take to reach the employer with the vacancy – should mean that everyone is now at the center of a hub of opportunities.

But delivering those opportunities is not going to be too easy. You may have one friend who is a talented and recently-laid off developer, and another who has a small software firm but there’s no reason to believe that the entrepreneur is hiring or that your best friend is the best candidate for any job that’s available.

The temptation when you’re caught in the middle is to start dishing out recommendations. They’re likely to be most effective at landing your friend a job and they don’t appear to cost anything.

But they do cost something. When you do more than bring two people together – when you actively try to push them together – you place your credibility on the line and you put your relationship with both parties at risk. If your friend with the job decides to go with someone else, you’ve helped one friend deliver an additional punch to the already bruised ego of another friend. Neither is going to thank you for that.

Worse, if the recommendation does result in an offer and the job doesn’t work out, both sides are going to blame you. Instead of making two friends’ lives better, chalking up two favors to be repaid in the future, and deepening your relationship with both of them, you’ve harmed two people, cut two connections and indicated that you’re more enthusiastic than reliable.

A better option is to make the introduction as cursory and as non-committal as possible. When a former colleague hints that he’d love to work at Oracle and he knows that you have a social media connection to someone at the company, don’t say you’ll do what you can. Just ask your friend at Oracle if there’s anything going and suggest that he adds your other friend to his own network. Indicate that he’s someone worth knowing when something does turn up and both sides will feel that they’re getting something out of the introduction. But it will be up to them to turn that introduction into an opportunity.

Re-Tweeting Job Opportunities

It’s not just social media’s connections that are become particularly valuable today though. The information that runs along those connections can be worth a salary too. Both Facebook, with its status updates, and Twitter with its microblogs, provide a way for information about vacancies to bubble to the surface. That might be as obvious as @problogger’s frequent postings of freelance writing jobs but it could also be something as subtle as someone tweeting that they’re mad-busy and can’t cope. Re-tweet even that kind of post to a unemployed pal – or better still, show them how to use Twitter’s search feature to find those kinds of tweets for themselves — and if they’re smart, they’ll get in touch with an offer of help, charged – initially, at least — by the hour.

And you can also apply your skills more directly to help a friend in need. Plenty of writers these days are finding themselves inundated with resumes to review and job applications to look over. This is the time to help not to cash in on friends in need, and that applies to non-writers too.

Website developers can knock up quick templates that their friends can use to post their resumes and portfolios, and write themselves a blog. Making sure that their name appears at the bottom of the pages will ensure that they get some free marketing out of it too. Creative types with ideas but no time to develop them can share their visions with pals with spare hours and few ideas of their own. They might just find that they get to build themselves a brand new business with the help of a currently unpaid partner.

Above all, remember that recessions and unemployment don’t last forever. Your non-busy friends will find new jobs and it’s likely that at least some of them will find them at companies you’d quite like to work for too. Be nice to your unemployed friends now and they’ll be nice to you when you want to move on up – or if the axe falls even closer.

If every cloud has a silver lining, the skies these days should be raining precious metal. The economy has been shrinking for a year, recruitment firms are awash with gilt-edged resumes and barely a week passes without some other major company either firing out P45s or filing for bankruptcy. Even Adobe recently told 600 workers to start shopping around for a new job.

You’d think that being part-owners of a pile of banks would make us all feel a lot richer than this.

These are tense times, times when it pays not just to have your contact book ready to hand and your LinkedIn profile up to date, but time too to have a plan in mind.

Or even better, two plans in mind.

Work from Home while You Build your Dream

One plan should be the goal you’ve always wanted to achieve – the business you’ve always wanted to build, the killer idea you’re fairly sure will buy you a Caribbean island, even the novel you’ve long been planning to write – but never had the time to work towards. If there is a flash of silver in the sky – and it’s not some business being struck by lightning – it’s that if your daily schedule is about to look fairly empty, you’ll soon have the opportunity to do all of those things you’ve always wanted to do.

But businesses, ideas and novels take time to create and in the meantime, you still need a plan that will continue to pay the mortgage and put food on the table for the kids to stick to the wall. That means doing things you might not have chosen to do but which you do because they pay, and because you can do them. And most importantly, you do them because you can do them from home, in your own time, with the understanding that you get to choose whether it’s a temporary thing until something better comes along or a whole new career with the kind of flexibility you’ve always really wanted.

Administrative work, for example, might not be for everyone but when you can do it virtually, it starts to look a lot more attractive. That’s especially true when administration can be stretched to include database management and website maintenance.

From Typing to Blogging

Andrea Pixley’s work day, for example, stretches from just 10am until 2pm and includes administrating pay-per-click accounts and maintaining ecommerce and customer support websites for four owners of small businesses, some of which are also home-based. Andrea, who lives in Columbia, SC, has been a virtual assistant since 2000 and chose to do it as a way of spending more time with her children who were small when she started.

Contact with clients is maintained through Andrea’s office phone, toll-free voicemail, email, fax, instant messaging and a cell phone for emergencies.

“Each client contacts me by the method that works best for them,” she says.

Australian Kathie Thomas has been a virtual assistant for even longer. She opened her home-based business back in 1996 and although she started by providing basic secretarial functions such as typing, data entry and-phone answering, her tasks too now cover roles more akin to tech support than coffee-making and paper-filing.

“As my knowledge of the web grew and developed I got into database management, Internet research, website maintenance and then design, Web hosting, and also blogging,” she told us. “I love blogging!”

Her clients largely consist of business coaches and professional speakers for whom Kathie manages databases, websites, online newsletters and sales.

According to a 2008 survey conducted by the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, a support group, over a fifth of virtual assistants have a four-year college degree and a further 9 percent have more than four years of college behind them. Hourly fees tend to be in the range of $30-$39 although two of the 500 respondents polled in the survey said that they charged $90 or more, and seven reported annual incomes of more than $100,000.

The advantages for the women who do this work – and it is primarily women; the survey found that almost 98 percent of virtual assistants are female and more than half are aged between 30 and 49 – are clear. They can work from home, according to a schedule that they set and they’re free to choose the number of hours they work too. Asked why she works as a virtual assistant, Kathie replied with one word: “convenience.”

” I love being at home, I love being here for my family. I like my space, my privacy and not having to tell anyone where I’m going if I choose to go out,”  she explained “ I choose the hours I want to work and the type of work I want to do.”

Even camaraderie can be provided through one of the many forums set up to help virtual assistants solve problems, swap ideas and stay in touch.

And the advantage for the client is clear too. Although many companies choose to pay a monthly retainer, they only pay for hours worked not simply for an assistant’s presence in the office. Nor do they have to supply office equipment or, more importantly, pay for their insurance, health care, sick leave or vacation time.

Breaking in doesn’t have to be too difficult either. Almost half of the virtual assistants surveyed said that they had picked up their first client within a month of opening their business and a similar percentage reported referrals as their most effective marketing stream. There’s now a range of different services providing training and accreditation, including AssistU and Kathie’s own course at VATrainer.

The work itself might not be right everyone. It requires attention to detail, a head for administration and a willingness to work for others even while working for yourself. But it does offer one additional benefit.

If your other plan works out, you can easily give up being a virtual assistant… and hire one.

Progress is a wonderful thing. There was a time when computers were the size of office buildings. Soon they were the size of offices. Things began to take off when they could fit comfortably inside an office. Now they contain Office.

Stick your laptop in your bag and your mobile in your pocket and you’ve got everything you need to do business and complete a day’s work.

Short of a chair, a table and an Internet connection.

It’s the need for those three things that has sent mobile workers out searching for places to park their Macs and write their emails. Starbucks might well be the world’s largest purveyor of over-priced coffee-based drinks, but among today’s digital nomads it’s probably best known as the world’s cheapest landlord of temporary office space.

Step into any bean parlor today, and you’ll find table after single-chaired table filled with tech types typing frantically on their keyboards.

But cafes have their disadvantages. You can’t sit in one for more than two hours on a single cup of coffee without looking like a cheapskate, and if you buy a cake as well, they soon become too expensive to use every day.

Worse, at some point after a couple of hours, you’ll need the bathroom which gives you the ultimate dilemma of choosing whether to leave your computer in a public place, asking a stranger to keep an eye on it, chaining it to the table or, even more suspiciously, taking it with you.

And of course, cafes don’t just come with coffee, they also come with people — people who talk, laugh, order drinks and ask you to look after their computers while they go to the bathroom. Cafes are nice for short work bursts and tasks that don’t demand too much concentration, but they’re not offices.

Co-working does provide an office and it provides company too. While that’s not what everyone needs every time they have a project to complete, working alongside other digital nomads can beat the loneliness that comes from being a one-person business. The connections too can often lead in all sorts of interesting directions.

“[A] lot of times because you were working alongside someone you would end up working with them on projects, especially because you are in a more social setting where if something is funky with your website, you’ll inevitably shout out ‘does anyone know why my page isn’t validating?’” Ryanne Hodson, co-founder of co-working site The Hat Factory, has told us. “You get to know people’s skills pretty quick and can recommend them for jobs and vice versa.”

But even co-working costs money and seeing the same people every day can generate the office gossip that being independent was supposed to save you from. Fortunately, there are still a few more options.

Turning the Library into an Office

One is to head for your local library. Unlike a café or a co-working space, you can be reasonably confident of finding silence here.  Most should also provide free wireless Internet and there’s no limit to the length of time you can sit before getting dark looks from a librarian.

You won’t find company here in the way that you can make friends in a café or co-working space and having spent much of your student days trying to avoid the library, it might feel a little strange to spend your working days hanging out in one every day. Worse, because library-working hasn’t really taken off, the people you’ll be working alongside are likely to be retired types and the unemployed. These days though, that second category is likely to include a bunch of familiar faces.

Libraries can be fine when you really want to focus and don’t want to be disturbed, but they’re studious not industrious. They make you feel like a college kid not a budding entrepreneur.

Hang out in Parks

Another alternative then is to make the most of your freedom and head for the wide open spaces. Roll up a blanket, pack some food and squeeze in some Red Bull to stop you falling asleep in the sun and work in the park. You’ll be able to find a spot with a beautiful view, and feel grateful that you have the kind of independent job that means that you’re not only boss-free but wall-free too.

It sounds ideal and it is if you’re planning to read a book, work without a deadline, have the kind of Yoga skills that can make working on the ground in Cobra comfortable or find a Web connection a distraction rather than a necessity.

And if the weather’s good too which, of course, it isn’t always.

For summer projects that don’t have to be produced under pressure, the park can be a pleasant addition to your office options. For other times, you’re going to need somewhere more indoors.

Become a Hotel Guest

A hotel is indoors and offers two kinds of work spaces. Rooms are available for paying guests and are usually the default options for laptop-packing travelers who need to get some work done on the move. They offer privacy and a desk. But they also provide the feeling of working in a bedroom and an Internet connection for an eye-watering fee. It’s clearly not worth paying the nightly rental just to give yourself a space to work for a few hours (even if authors are known to do it sometimes) but if you’re on the road and need somewhere more personal than Starbucks to get your work done,  the room is usually the default option.

The lobby though is open to everyone. As in a café, you’ll have to order something and even a cup of coffee in a swanky hotel is likely to burn a hole in your wallet. But you can stay there for hours, and if you pick the right hotel you should find that it’s full of business types rather than chatty tourists, and it should be quieter than most cafes too.

You’ll need to be in the sort of town that has big business hotels and the expense means that you won’t be able to do it every day, but when you really want to get out of the house while still getting some work done, a hotel lobby may be just the ticket.

Stay at Home

But then again, home does have its attractions. You might not actually want to work in your underwear or even your pajamas but there is something to be said for a commute that you can measure in steps rather than traffic lights.

In practice, digital nomads work in all sorts of different ways. It might be easy to say that social types use co-working spaces, lurkers prefer cafes, and sociopaths hide in the library but different projects and different times demand different kinds of work environments. Unlike salaried types though, freelancers always have a range of different offices to choose from.

A Personal Dashboard doesn’t have to be just for your personal affairs but can include aspects of your life and work on or offline. There are actually a number of web applications that are considered a type of web dashboard, including Pageflakes and Netvibes. Some people even use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, or a calendaring tool such as Google Calendar as a sort of web dashboard.

The drawback is that these sorts of apps are very narrow in their feature set, especially Google Reader. Sure, you can track all the sites you like to read daily, but that’s about it. With portals like Pageflakes and Netvibes, you can do a bit more. Yet you cannot track other types of information, images, links, lists, etc. Most of all, it’s not necessarily in a handy format.

A much more suitable application choice for a proper Personal Dashboard is to use a mind mapping tool. You have your choice of desktop or web-based packages, and even the latter are starting to offer sophisticated feature sets.

What’s a Personal Dashboard For?

A personal dashboard is a sophisticated way to digitally track your offline and online life, both for work and personal. Here are some possible bits of information you might keep in your personal dashboard, in no particular order.

1. Personal goals – career, relationship, etc.
2. Tasks by time period – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, long-term.
3. Personal tasks – meetings, appointments, reminders.
4. Work tasks.
5. Schedule.
6. Work log – a record of what you did, by day or even by hour.
7. Reading list – online (URLs), or print (list of magazines, books, authors).
8. Passwords.
9. Notes in full text.
10. Links to finished documents, including word processor or spreadsheet files.
11. Design snippets

Why Mind Mapped Dashboards?

Why use a mind mapping tool? A mind mapped personal dashboard allows for high productivity, for all the same reasons to use a mind mapping tool at all: flexibility and diagrammatic representation, stimulation of thinking processes, and more. You can view mind maps in detail or at a high level, use different shapes, colors, line styles, text fonts and so on. Mind maps stimulate both sides of the brain, logical and creative. So you could take your personal dashboard and expand it to link to other mind maps where you’ve worked out solutions to work or life problems.

If you think you’ll miss your RSS reader app or your favorite portal, no problem. Most desktop-based mind mapping tools allow you to link a map node to an application. So a mind map becomes more of a meta-dashboard that can provide hooks into your desktop applications and documents, as well web pages, and store snippets or even large blocks of text.

So it doesn’t replace portals, calendars, to do lists, etc. What you have instead is a central area where you can access what’s important to you each day, arranged in some diagrammatic fashion that is optimum for your use.

Here’s a summary of the value of using a mind map for your personal dashboard in more detail:

1. Radial thinking – the visual structure of many mind maps forms a radial pattern, which supports a more open type of thinking pattern.
2. Hierarchical structure – any information that has hiearchy can be well-represented in a mind map.
3. Flexible structure – easily reorganize information.
4. High or low view – ability to expand/ collapse map nodes so that you can get focused view or a bird’s eye view, respectively.

An advanced mind mapping tool allows:

1. Active linking to documents (web pages or on hard drive) and applications. Clicking a linked map node starts up the application associated with the attached document type.
2. Synchronization with MS Office, including Excel, Word, Outlook, MS Project and other files.
3. Inclusion of native spreadsheet blocks (as an alternate to linking to a spreadsheet file).
4. Creation and linking to sub-maps.
5. Attachment of notes to map nodes. In terms of workflow, this is a productivity boon. This makes it easy to find associated notes.
6. Inclusion of images in map nodes.
7. Floating nodes that represent peripherally related information which should not be part of the main map.
8. A variety of map styles.
9. A type of diagramming, using map node shapes, lines, borders and relationships.
10. Building of complex mind maps, depending on the tool used.

A Sample Personal Dashboard Mind Map

Depending on which mind mapping tool you are using, you can get pretty sophisticated with a personal dashboard. A great example of a personal board is in MindJet’s library. The snapshot above shows an overview of this dashboard, but I recommend you see it in full. To view the mind map, you’ll need a copy of MindJet’s MindManager Pro 7 (free fully functioning trial) or their free MindManager Viewer 7 map viewer. The Windows version of MindManager offers a 30-day fully functioning trial. For Mac, it’s 21 days.

The drawback, at least as far as I found, is that MindManager can get addictive, and if can’t afford the steep price (which is worth it if you are a hardcore mind mapper like myself). What you might want to do instead is start with a copy of the free multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) FreeMind. Work with FreeMind, get used to the process, if you haven’t used mind maps before.

If you like the general feel of using a mind map, then consider downloading a trial version of MindJet MindManager (Windows, Mac OS X). This should give you enough time and feature variety to determine if you like mind mapping enough to purchase software or stick with FreeMind. Or a relatively expensive desktop option that I’ve used extensively, amongst several dozen, is MindApp, though it’s nowhere nearly as sophisticated as MindManager.

If you prefer using something web-based, there are several options, including Mindomo, Mindmeister, or Comapping. However, don’t always expect the full sophistication of a desktop, especially the ability to fire up desktop applications.

It’s a type of holy grail: trying to get more work done in less time than you’re spending now. Entrepreneurs, web workers, freelancers, writers, designers, coders… Doesn’t matter what type of work, you’re probably wondering how to increase your work productivity.

Well there are ways to increase work productivity. These are some tips that have worked for me over the years.

1. Plan. Judicious planning can make the difference in your productivity. While some people can fire off several units of work from scratch, most of us need some time to consider a few ideas, absorb some relevant details/ research, and have time to brew our results – whether it’s an article, logo, web design, code or whatever.

2. Use mind maps to organize. Lists are fine as a starting point, but mind maps are a far more productive tool to organize information.

3. Have lots of ideas. The more ideas you have, the greater the chance that one of them is worth pursuing. Professional photographers, for example, tend to find this out intrinsically. They might take an entire roll of film (well before digital cameras) with the expectation that 1-3 frames might produce a usable picture. Inventors also try many ideas before getting to something that works.

4. Filter your ideas. Use discretion and judgement to filter ideas for feasibility. That is, if you manage to create a large flow of ideas on a regular basis, learn how to pick out the winners. You can be like Thomas Edison and come up with 9,999 ways not to invent a light bulb, but you’d save so much more time if you filter for worthwhile ideas.

5. Sketch/ diagram. Producing visuals for your ideas not only help convey them to others but stimulates a different frame of thinking. It’s also easier to visualize your end results and work towards that. Diagramming always helped to produce code faster.

6. Think peripherally. The answers to your questions might come to you from unexpected sources. Sure, that sounds a bit cryptic, but I’ve always attributed my usually high productivity to immersing my mind in different topics and content formats. This gives me creative flow, and combining unusual ideas (”intersecting”) sometimes produces solutions I wouldn’t otherwise think of. (For more about “idea intersection,” I highly recommend reading The Medici Effect – free PDF copy at main website.)

7. Build on your past successes. Why waste your past efforts? Is there anything you’ve done previously that will help you complete faster what you are doing now? For example, the reason why I could often produce a thousand lines of working, partially-documented computer code in 2-3 days was because of reusing code fragments I’d developed in the past. Each fragment had its own functionality. You’ll have to extend this paradigm to whatever work you do, but here’s another example. When I freelance write, I often work in niches with overlapping topics. This is usually intentional, sometimes fortunate. What it means is that I can leverage a few hours of research for one article by reusing some of it for a later article. By spending a bit of time planning possible future articles, I save a lot of time and get a lot of work done.

8. Batch tasks. Work in such a way now that you can reuse or leverage current efforts later. One way to do this is to batch a group of related tasks. Instead of fragmenting your time doing small tasks one at a time and spread out, consider if you can allot a block of time (time chunking) to do them all at once. This allows you to focus on related efforts. With some tasks, it might require a bit of planning, but the time saved makes it worthwhile.

For example, if you’re a writer and tend to research and write for each article as the need arises, you are not batching tasks nor leveraging your efforts. Assuming that you’ll have a block of articles in a short period of time (say a month at most) which have something in common (topic or niche), you might be able to plan them all at once and even research for them simultaneously. So if you plan and outline your batch of articles now, you leave time for ideas to brew, to allow the articles to grow. I tend to use a mind map to organize and develop my article ideas, simply because mind mapping software allows you to easily switch between “big picture” and “detailed view.”

This batching can be applied to admin tasks or regular work. I no longer check my email every 15 minutes. I’ll spend 5 minutes every hour or two hours to check a few email accounts, one forum, and Twitter or Plurk.

9. Allot less time for your work. If you work at home, it’s quite likely that you’ll mix business and pleasure time if you don’t make a conscious effort not to. That means you’ll just take that much longer to get your work done. However, this principle can apply no matter where you work. Setting artificial deadlines might motivate you to be more efficient with your work.

You have an idea for a startup business, but with the world’s economy already in or heading for recession, finding the funds you need is not going to be easy. Still, you can build the funds you need for your initial startup phase using a tried and tested approach known as bootstrapping.

What is Bootstrapping?
Bootstrapping is a classic entrepreneurial approach to self-financing a business. The basic principle is simple: start with whatever funds you have and reinvest all or most of the revenue your business earns. Take a very minimum of revenues for personal use. Do whatever else you have to to pay your personal expenses.

The Pitfalls of Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is not an easy approach for most entrepreneurs. It does require sacrifices, dedication, and persistence. There’s no guarantee that it will ultimately take you towards business success, which can be frustrating, disheartening and more.

The Benefits of Bootstrapping
With bootstrapping, you’re in control. You don’t owe any one blood (family, friends) or loan (investors) money. You build incredible discipline that will stand you in good stead for your next venture. Today’s entrepreneurs have the added benefit of the Internet and being connected. That means being able to run all or parts of your business while mobile or even traveling. Oh, did we mention all the free software?

Bootstrapping Your Startup Business
Successful bootstrapping does require a certain mindset that is willing to put up with sacrifice and compromise in return for a later reward. In a very real sense, it’s the same as wealth-building mentality.

1. Have a plan. Not just a business plan but also a life plan, since the two WILL be intertwined for some time to come.
2. Change your habits. Minimize your personal expenses by cutting out anything you don’t need. (Told you there’d be sacrifices.) That will build up extra savings that can be put towards your startup.
3. Use free software. Inexpensive and free software for desktop and web browsers abounds online. A lot of free apps are suited business use. These applications can help you manage your business, plans, finances, team, tasks, customers, and more. Take advantage of the free trial periods that many software companies now offer for their applications. Some apps are good for 7-30 day free trial, and are often fully-functioning. Through clever planning of download and installation, you just might be able to coast for several months without spending a cent on software. If your business is entirely online, it’s quite possible to create success out of literally just your time and bootstrapping principles.
4. Minimize your business expenses. In some industries, you need to give the appearance of prosperity. However, buy expensive new furniture, cabinetry, computers and whatever else is not necessary for everyone. For example, don’t go overboard on your office expenses, whether it’s at home or rented somewhere. Do you even need a business office or can you work at home? If you take an office, does it have to be so large? Can you share with another entrepreneur? Are you applying a “green” approach to cut office operating costs? Never mind that “friend” calling you a cheap so and so. This is sometimes what you have to do when you bootstrap: operate lean and green.
5. Decide between wants and needs. This is an extension of the last two rules. You have to decide what you absolutely need right now and be (or learn to be) disciplined enough to defer the “wants” until your business has disposable income. If you want to treat yourself, do it out of your personal income.
6. Get out of debt. If you have personal debt – aside from a mortgage or car loan – consider paying it all off before you launch your startup. Get into the habit of having minimal debt, so that you apply the same mindset to your entrepreneurial endeavors.
7. Increase your personal income. Your startup while slowly take over your life if you let it. If you stand firm and keep some time for yourself each week, use it to build additional personal income.
8. Increase your revenue. It’s inadvisable, but if you would rather put all your free time into your business, then try to come up with ways to increase its revenue now. Try building multiple streams of income on the side to fund the long-term goals of your startup.
9. Think critically. Try new methods to get to where you want to be. Apply advanced problem solving.
10. Apply guerilla marketing. Thinking outside the box isn’t enough. You need to go ahead and implement your plans, and to do so while spending the minimal amount of funds. Leverage the Internet as much as possible. Learn online marketing and bootstrap your own target market. How you do this really depends on what kind of business you are building, but writing targeted articles on your company site is one possibility.

One last bit of advice: the successful bootstrapper embraces challenges with a DIY (do it yourself) attitude. It’s not always a necessity but it doesn’t hurt. That is, why pay for something if you can do it yourself? However, factor in that if your time is worth $X/hour in revenues and you can hire someone to do something for much less, there will come a point where you need to hire and delegate.

If you’re in this situation, there’s a simple piece of advice that bears reviewing, something you’ve probably heard countless times before: take one step at a time. It’s a very simple but powerful approach, since it’s far easier to focus on one small step or change at a time.

How It Works

The key to conquering large tasks is break them down into smaller subtasks, then to only focus on the current subtask. Even better, if you “hide” everything but the current subtask, it becomes easier to focus. You already know what comes after, but you keep distractions to a minimum by focusing. This way, you can enjoy small successes each step of the way, and large tasks become less intimidating.

Managing Tasks

Once you break a large task down into smaller tasks, you have a choice of methods for managing your taskload. Here are a few methods.

To-do List Software

To-do list applications are great for brainstorming a stream of consciousness and writing down thoughts as they come to you. However, they’re not as ideal later when you need to organize your thoughts, cluster ideas together.

It’s often better to scribble down your thoughts in a list, on a piece of paper, then apply another method, such as mind mapping (below). Another flaw with to-do lists is that if you have deadlines attached to each subtask, it’s sometimes difficult to get an overview of related tasks. Calendaring software (below) might be more suitable.

Some sample to-list applications are Ta-da Lists, Todoist, and Remember the Milk (RTM). RTM integrates with Google Calendar. Some of these function well on cell phones, especially those with large screens such as the iPhone.

Calendaring Software

Free Web-based calendar software abounds, and using it is another way to manage tasks, provided you know when you need to complete each task. The real benefit of web-based calendaring apps is that you can access your calendar(s) from anywhere that you have an Internet connection, often including from a mobile phone. Some calendar tools even synchronize seamlessly with to-do list applications. So you could import events recorded on your mobile phone, or from your web-stored lists.

If you don’t know which calendar tool to use, Mashable lists over 65 of them. Some of them, including Google Calendar, have APIs to build custom applications with. Or you could simply combine a to-do list app such as Remember the Milk, mentioned above, with Google Calendar, giving you a more robust way to manage tasks.

Project Management

Project management, aka PM, is a very sophisticated approach for managing a set of related subtasks. Good Project Management software offers a number of tools and methods, such as Gantt charts, critical paths, etc. If tasks are spread out over a team of people, you can track their efforts as well, check their workload, determine which tasks are project bottlenecks, and get a rough idea of how long an entire project is going to take. I say “rough” because subtask durations might change, and any later subtask dependent on a previous task will be affected, as might the entire project.

Project management is a very structured approach that is typically better suited to large, complex projects with many dozens of tasks and one or more team members. Smaller projects might benefit from some PM principles, though often there is too much rigidity or over-management of tasks.

Mind Mapping

Mind maps can take over where to-do lists leave off, are sometimes robust enough for managing projects, and are an ideal tool for  implementing a “one step at a time” approach for several reasons. (In fact, most mind mapping software allows you to put to-do lists aside, and offer equivalent functionality.)

1. Mind mapping software lets you expand or collapse parts of a mind map with ease. This allows you to see the big picture but to also focus on the small picture details when you need to.
2. They are a free-form way to record information, tasks, links, and other bits of data. To this information, you can apply as little or as much structure and hierarchy if and when you want to do so.
3. Mind map nodes can show text, icons, or images, and link to documents or activate applications on your computer desktop or in a web browser.  This means that if you use a suitable mind mapping application, you can integrate any type of to-do list, calendar or PM app from different parts of the map. Using mind maps, you have the benefit of all of the above-listed methods, if you want – giving you a more robust approach to task management. A mind map can then act like your project command center, and can itself be integrated with a master mind map or personal dashboard map.

An added benefit is that an increasing number of mind mapping applications – e.g., MindJet MindManager – are either incorporating PM features or are integrated with separate PM software, including Microsoft Project.

Of the methods listed above, mind mapping gives you the most flexibility and can incorporate the other methods.