As I’m watching all of these events — mostly via streaming — I’m struck by one thing in particular: The athletes represent the consummate niche professional. They do one thing (or sometimes two or three, but all under the same basic umbrella) and they do it very, very well.

In the past, I’ve written about the importance of being a jack of all trades as a web worker. That remains a good strategy for weathering the storm of economic uncertainty, but in more stable times a specialist will always be paid more than a generalist, and likely have more opportunities at hand, too. At least in some parts of the world, signs of recovery are good, so it follows that now is a good time to look to the example of the Olympian for inspiration.

The key to Olympic success is choosing your sport and focusing on it to the exclusion of almost all else while in training. Depending on the sport, that focus doesn’t necessarily need to be a lifelong aspiration, but while an athlete is training for it, they go all in. No half-measures are involved in competing an an international level. The same is true for the best and brightest web professionals. Take Toronto-based social media expert Scott Stratten, for example. I’ve never come across anyone with quite the same degree of tunnel vision regarding their career and specific niche.

The major differences between a web professional and an Olympic athlete (besides, most likely, level of fitness) are two-fold: First, you likely don’t have a dedicated coach or coaches. Second, the line between training and event is never as distinct for web workers as it is for competitive athletes.

A lack of coaching means that you have to emphasize praxis, meaning you have to observe and take into account both the theory and practice sides of your work. Athletes do this too, but they can focus on the doing while the coach emphasizes the thinking, reflection and analysis that leads to improvement. The best way to go about this is to keep detailed records and work logs. Improving how you work is just as important as improving your product; the two are inseparably tied.

As for the training/performance distinction, this is actually an advantage web working specialists have, depending on how you feel about pressure. Every time you get to flex your muscles, you’re probably doing so in exchange for pay. It’s a good idea to practice when you can with unpaid work that won’t necessarily by seen, or with pro bono work for charitable organizations, but by and large your training will take place on the fly. To simulate the effect of training for a major event, rank your upcoming projects and engagements when possible and treat the smaller ones as lead-up to the big ones. This should help you excel when your work is garnering the most attention.

Unlike Olympic athletes, you might not get a chance at the podium, but you will get a chance at being recognized as among the best in your field. Especially as companies begin to have more money for highly focused projects, sharpening your focus and being the best at your niche could play huge dividends.

Are you a generalist or a specialist?

I saw Mel Gibson on a talk show last night. He was there to promote a new action flick he has coming out, and the host asked him about his “Three E” approach to movie making. He responded that there are three things he tries to achieve with his movies: first entertain, then educate, and then, if possible, elevate.

I instantly thought these were admirable objectives to shoot for in almost any kind of communication, though the order of priority would vary depending on the type of communication and its purpose. It may seem like I’m stating the obvious, but what came to my mind right away was how appropriate these three objectives would be for a content development strategy.

Then it occurred to me that in this context, there has to be a fourth “E,” one that is pretty critical in the social Web: engage.

I wrote about content strategy not too long ago. It’s a hot topic and a rising career field. So if you create content (and who doesn’t these days?), you might want to ask yourself if your content satisfies any of these four criteria. Think of them as a kind of quality control standard.

The content you create — from animated demos to blogs to tweets to videos on YouTube — all influence your clients’ and peers’ perception of you. As a professional, you understand the importance of the quality of your product, and you should consider your content as one of your products.

Think about the people you follow on Twitter or whose blogs you read. Chances are your favorites provide a lot of Es. I looked at the tweets of one of the people I enjoy following, and found that most of his tweets qualified:

Just for fun, take a look at what you put out there and do a quick analysis to assess the quality of your content based on the four Es. What do you see?

If you want to learn more about content strategy, don’t miss “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” two days devoted to the topic in Paris in April.

What guidelines do you use for the content you create?

You may not want to do one of the obvious web worker jobs such as being a writer or virtual assistant. Maybe something in this list will resonate with you.

• Accountant / Bookkeeper: The people who keep track of money. They review invoices, expenses, payroll and taxes and make sure everything balances. They also verify the receiving and sending of all payments.
• Coach: While people tend to prefer meeting with coaches face-to-face, some are turning to virtual coaches and communicating with them by phone, email and other online technologies.
• Course Developer: Design courses for online or offline programs. The course developer may or may not also do the teaching.
• Customer Service Rep: Answer customer questions about a company’s products and services. Reps can work with customers by email, phone, online chat and social networks. While this often involves working for a company, web workers can provide customer services for small businesses that don’t have full-time employees to do the job.
• Editor: Slice and dice content to sharpen the writing and improve grammar.
• Graphic Designer: Create, design and modify artwork for web sites, web-based applications, print, brochures, pamphlets and more.
• Marketer and Public Relations (PR): Marketers and PR professionals communicate and build relationships in hopes of getting a product or service in front of customers and the media.
• Online Community Manager: These folks Manage community for businesses or organizations by facilitating, creating content, evangelizing and evolving the community.
• Product Sales: Many people make a full-time career out of selling products via online auctions and stores. Some manage web sites that work like a gateway to many products and sites, earning their cash through affiliate programs or site sponsors.
• Programmer / Developer: Develops software or the back-ends of web sites.
• Publisher: This growing career goes beyond printing books into producing e-books and selling them on their own sites or through affiliates.
• Recruiter / Human Resources (HR): Find and vet candidates for companies needing to fill positions or hire temporary workers.
• Sales / Telemarketer: Despite all the complaints about telemarketers, some businesses do a good job with their sales and telemarketing services.
• SEM and SEO: Study PPC rates, key words and click rates. They determine what works and what doesn’t work, then suggest how to improve the metrics. Beware these are two different specialties requiring different knowledge and skills.
• Teacher / Professor: Getting a college degree online is no longer taboo as many programs have proven to be as good as on-campus programs. High schools offer online classes so students can make up a failed course or get needed credits. Classes aren’t limited to education credits. Plenty of folks want to further their knowledge of a general topic.
• Tech Support: Applications that allow you to work on a computer as if you’re in front of it have opened the door for tech support jobs that you can do anywhere.
• Virtual Assistant: Manage appointments, data entry, time tracking and much more. VAs can very well do many of the jobs listed here, as it has a broad definition.
• Writer: The folks are all about words. They can do blogging, writing for print and online publications, working with businesses on their content or training materials and doing technical writing.
• Web designer: This site and many others would never come to fruition without the talents of a web designer. Not only do they create web sites, but they also design the front-end of web-based applications while the web developer or programmer handles the things we can’t see.
• Web Site Manager / Webmaster: They maintain existing web sites by adding content on a regular basis, optimizing the site, monitoring problems and answering questions that come in. They might also add tools, widgets and other features to grow and enhance the web site as well as manage ads.
• Video Producer and Editor: Create and edit videos to tell a story to communicate the key message for the organization behind the video.

Although web workers have various common traits, discipline is a biggie. Web working requires you be able to motivate yourself to get the work done and to get more business. Unless you’re part of a virtual team, no one will push you to complete your tasks.

What other careers can you do from anywhere?

Photo credit: Brenda Lamothe Coulomme

Even if they’re not for you, the question sparked by these graphical resumes is: What are our options for resume-building in the twenty-tens? We all know a resume is supposed to show off our skills and experience, but in the digital age, there’s no end the ways you might communicate these things.

Let’s put some boundaries around this discussion, then: we’ll talk about paper resumes only. And we’ll assume that the company advertising the job wants to peruse your application letter and a short resume before they visit your site.

Let’s look first at a few of the more common resume tactics from the “naughties” (and earlier).

Where We’re Coming From

The most common, basic inclusions for a resume are:

• contact details
• employment history
• education
• achievements
• referees

In addition to these details, resumes may include:

• a list of relevant skills
• an outline of extra-curricular or spare-time projects and interests
• a career or life objective
• a favorite or inspiring quote
• a personal statement of your philosophy
• a headshot

No we’ve covered the basics and we know where resumes have come from. But where are they going?

Where We’re Going

The graphical resume might be handy for those who are designers themselves, or have a designer on hand to tailor their resume to suit every job they apply for.

But what about you? There’s little point, for example, in me creating a graphical map of my experience, because my skills are neither figures- nor graphically-oriented. It would be cute, sure, but not particularly relevant.

The first rule of resume recreation should be: Let your resume reflect you.

If you love travel, or you’ve worked in a range of different locations, maybe you’ll create a visual resume using a map of the world. If you’re in tourism, or transport, you might consider a roadmap. If you’re in IT, what about a circuit board? If it’s business consulting or project management, can you use a process flow, Gantt chart or venn diagram as the basis for explaining what you do?

Conceptual Resumes for the Non-visual

If you’re not into a graphical representation, you may consider theming your resume document around your work.

The second rule of resume recreation should probably be: Try to avoid being dinky or cute. Keep it simple and respect your readership.

This second rule is a fine line to tread. Let’s look at a couple of possible examples and you can make up your own mind.

First up, a book editor might lightly theme their resume around the structure of a book, for example, describing their work history in “chapters”:

“Chapter 1, 2001-2003, in which I work for Publisher, LLC and learn the fine art of author management.”

The book editor could theme their entire resume in this way, using the parts of the book — dedication, contents, acknowledgments, introduction, chapters, references and further reading — to bring their goals, experience, education, skills, and referees together in a way that might appeal to prospective employers.

A journalistic photographer could present their resume in the style of a newspaper or magazine, with the articles — or simply captions — for each image identifying the photograph’s subject, the year it was taken and which publication it appeared in, the technical or practical challenges the photographer overcame, and the skills they used to produce each shot.

An event photographer might present their resume as an album, listing the project challenges, techniques and skills they used, and relevant referees underneath each image in the same shorthand way we annotate wedding or holiday photographs.

A PA could present their resume using diary format, making each item in their work history an “appointment”, listing their skills under a heading like “reminders”, including their career goal as a “to-do item”, and so on.

In each case, the theme I’ve suggested for the resume reflects something about the individual that’s integral to their success in the field.

For example, the PA could theme their resume around a document like a memo, or meeting minutes, if creating these tools would be part of the job they’re applying for. But the diary format suggests that the PA is focused on time and resource management, that the person gets things done, can juggle many tasks at once, and so on.

So the third rule of resume recreation should be: Choose a resume format that reflects a crucial quality you’ll need to succeed in the role you’re applying for.

Where to from Here?

Once you have your paper resume prepared, you can consider how to translate it to other media you might want to use.

Perhaps you’ll use it to build (or revamp) your web site as part of your larger social media resume. Perhaps, if you’re a creator of some kind, you’ll augment it with an online, physical or CD-based portfolio of work samples.

Have you used an alternative to the standard, old-school paper resume? Tell us what you did — and how it worked.

In the wonderful world of web work, creating a USP for yourself can be a great idea. I’m not talking about creating a USP for your product or service here. I’m talking about yourself: you, the person, the professional.

Rather than reducing yourself or your capabilities to a single sentence, creating a USP can boost your self-awareness and expand your possibilities. And creating your own USP doesn’t mean you’re commoditizing yourself — on the contrary, it can give you a sense of where your professional self stops and your personal or social self begins.

Why USPs Matter for the Web Worker

In a world of constant connectivity, where social and professional networking services routinely cross paths and purposes, company web sites boast personal blogs, and the photos or video you took of an event today may well feature as part of tomorrow’s news report, the definitions of concepts like “personal” and “public” are most certainly blurred. Today, you’re a web developer. Tomorrow, a movie reviewer. The day after, who knows?

Beyond these obvious questions, additional issues can abound for remote workers who rarely, if ever, visit company offices. Without easy, casual, face-to-face opportunities for communication on professional or personal levels, your colleagues can begin to see you as “the stats guy” or “the monthly report girl”, rather than a well-rounded, engaging individual with a complex, extensive skill set, career ambitions and a hunger for new professional challenges.

Creating a USP for yourself can remind you of how you see yourself — within a given setting, such as the workplace, if you wish — and what you believe you’re about. It can then help you clearly communicate who you are, what you do, and what you want, in a forum that’s at once noisy, complex, disparate, and all-pervading.

Benefits of a USP

I think it’s the process of creating a USP that’s most important, although the USP itself can help you keep your boat steady through the unpredictable waters ahead. Here are the kinds of benefits creating a USP can deliver:

1. It lets you focus on the thing you’re best at.
2. It helps you to define what you want.
3. It lets you identify the people who will value what you offer.
4. It can help you focus your efforts, choose appropriate projects, goals, and communications channels.
5. It can help you secure more or better-paid roles.
6. It can make your professional and/or personal life more rewarding.

How can a USP do all these things? You’ll see, once you understand how to create one for yourself.

Creating Your USP

In marketing circles, the best USPs take the following form:

[Product or service] delivers [benefit] to [audience].

Simple, right? Wrong. If you’ve never done this before, you might think that this USP looks OK:

Coca Cola delivers beverages to thirsty people.

The problem here is that “beverages” isn’t a benefit. You could substitute “refreshment” for “beverages”, but you’d still be wide of the mark. The marketer might see Coca Cola’s offering as something like this:

Coca Cola delivers fun, energy and friendship to young, life-loving adults.

Take a look at some ads for Coke, and you’ll see what I mean.

In creating your USP, you need to look beyond the obvious to what you really offer, and who really benefits from it. As such, creating your USP requires you to ask the following questions of yourself.

1. Who are you?

You might choose to create a USP for your professional self, your public self, or for some other aspect of who you are. You may find it helpful to create individual USPs for your different “faces”, and compare them to see where they align, and where they don’t.

In creating my USP, I decided to focus on who I am professionally. I recently decided I wanted to shift my career focus from copywriting to article writing, so my USP begins:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers … “

2. What unique benefit do you offer?

If you’ve described yourself using your job title, as I have, you might be tempted to state what you do in answer to this question, but remember that we’re talking about benefits, not product.

As a freelance article writer, articles are my product. The benefit I need to deliver to the people I write for is the ability to reliably meet their, and their readers’, needs with quality content. So my USP now reads like this:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers the ability to reliably meet publications’, and their readers’, needs with quality content to… “

As you can see, my USP already gives me a clear area of focus: I’m not about putting sentences together. I’m about understanding publications’ target audiences, and providing quality content that will meet those target audience needs. I’ve also mentioned the publications themselves — I’ll provide the content to their timeframes, length and style specifications, and so on.

The only way I could work out what I really had to offer was to understand the people who operate in the industry I want to work in. This is essential in making sure the benefit you offer is needed and desired by your target audience. Let’s look at the question of audience next.

3. Who do you offer your benefit to?

Again, this element of the equation isn’t necessarily as clear-cut as it seems. Although I might easily fill in the gap with the word “publishers”, I need to think about the people I wanted to work with.

Similarly, instead of just dropping your current employer’s name into that space, you might like to think a little more broadly. Who else might be able to gain from the benefit you offer? Asking yourself this question may well open up whole new realms of professional or public possibility.

For example, I decided that I wanted specifically to target media outlets that focused on environmental issues, so I finished off my USP like this:

“Georgina, freelance article writer, delivers the ability to reliably match publications’, and their users’, needs with quality content to media outlets that focus on sustainability.”

It’s OK, but it’s long. A long USP is hard to remember, which is a problem. You want a USP that you can recall easily so that when someone offers you a piece of work off the cuff, you can automatically assess whether it fits your USP, and respond accordingly.

Another issue is that “sustainability” is a pretty broad area. If I want to write about sustainability for ordinary citizens (rather than for business, government, technology buffs, and so on), I might rephrase my audience definition to reflect that.

Now, if I pare my USP back to the bare essentials, I end up with something like this:

“Georgina, freelance writer, reliably meets user needs with quality content for media outlets that focus on grassroots sustainability.”

What Can Your USP Do for You?

Remember those benefits I mentioned earlier? By now, you’ll be able to see how creating a USP meets them. In the example I’ve given here, I’ve really defined a professional goal. It’s not just any professional goal, though; it’s one that is inherently linked with what I personally believe are my innate, unique capabilities and interests.

If you’re already working in a role you want to work in, for a company you want to work for, you might use your USP to define yourself as the ideal person for that role in that company — as “the preferred provider of quality content that meets user needs”, for example.

The process of creating your USP has made you conscious of your desires, how you perceive yourself, how you want to be perceived, and what you want to do to achieve that reputation. Now that you’ve worked through the process, you can use this knowledge to inform your behavior, activities and interactions in your chosen public and professional spheres — including any new arenas that your USP might illuminate for you.

As an example, the USP I’ve created here alludes to my creating content other than just articles, and media other than straight print or text-based publications. But it goes much further than that. In my professional life as someone who understands what people want to know about the practical impacts they can have on the environment, I might research public opinions on the topic, study new developments that reduce the average citizen’s ecological footprint, participate in interviews, panels or conferences that deal with these issues, and so on.

If you’ve written a USP for your professional self in your workplace, it may prompt you to pursue new opportunities, take on different challenges, and engage with staff members you haven’t worked with before. If you’ve written a USP for your endeavors in your own business, it may help you to discern between promotional opportunities; assist you to choose which pieces of information about yourself and your operations you disseminate, when, and how; and drive your sales, customer management, and business development efforts.

Do you think a personal USP could help you focus your efforts? If you’re already working with a USP, tell us how it’s going.

I spend a lot of time on this site talking directly or indirectly about why I love freelancing, or what makes it so great, but in the interest of being fair and balanced, I want to take a break from my regularly scheduled gushing to point out some very serious pitfalls about working on your own. Many may seem like common sense, but it’s amazing how often it happens that people forget to consider these downsides when choosing to pursue this lifestyle.

Every Day Off Costs You Money

I remember paid vacation. I remember being irate at the fact that I’d only get two weeks out of the year, at best. And yet now, I’d love for someone to actually pay me money to take two weeks and not do any work. It seems like some kind of fantastical dream.

Now, when I want to take time off, I either have to do a lot of extra work before and after to make up for lost revenue, work while I’m away, or just write the time off as a loss. It’s not only a burden on finances, but it weighs on your mind, too, if you’re the conscientious type. As a result, letting go and truly relaxing can be harder when you’re responsible for every dime you take in.

Convincing People and Banks to Trust Your Money is Harder

Try getting a mortgage when you have to tell the bank that your income is wholly derived from contracts you have with various employers that range from temporary to semi-permanent, but all of which could potentially end without much warning. It’s not easy. Some institutions offer special considerations for freelancers, but for the most part, these deals come with strings attached.

Even negotiating with landlords in high-demand markets is a bit of a challenge. When the landlord or property management company holds all the cards, they choose tenants carefully, and getting an employment letter isn’t always possible for freelancers. Basically, be prepared for every one to second-guess your ability to generate income on a steady basis.

Taxation, Expenses and Insurance Are Completely DIY

If you’re not used to keeping track of your own finances and preparing for tax time completely on your own, it can be a huge surprise when the time does come. Most employers automatically deduct taxation from your wages, but with freelance work, you’re often paid the full amount with the expectation that you will pay taxes when they come due. That means it’s very rare to get a return on your taxes. Instead, you’ll usually end up owing a hefty sum.

Preparing for that is a simple matter of putting aside an amount in excess of what you estimate your taxes owed will be, but that’s easier said then done. Money on hand seems like it’s there to be spent, especially when unexpected costs arise. If you’re not careful, tax time could find you seriously lacking.

Add to that the fact that health insurance is pretty much up to you, and you can see how what seems like a sizable income can quickly become a subsistence wage. Factor in insurance, retirement savings, and tax when you’re calculating your overhead for freelancing before you embark upon a career as an independent.

Weigh the Good and the Bad

If you’re dissatisfied with your day job and thinking about leaving the rat race for freelancing, you may not want to hear about the downsides to making such a choice, but knowing just what you’re in for is key to making a sound decision you can live with. And if you have very good reasons for wanting to go it alone, chances are the cons won’t outweigh the pros anyway. They certainly don’t for me.

Have you considered the cons (as well as the pros) of taking on a freelance career?

Image by toolfan.hess from flickr

What is Content Strategy?

Kristina Halvorson sums it up nicely in her superb article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” on A List Apart:

“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”

If you’re tweeting or updating on Facebook or elsewhere, you’ve got creation and publication of content down. But what about all the other keywords in that definition?

Developing a Content Strategy For Your Social Media Presence

Putting together a content strategy for your social media presence can be a real challenge, especially when you mix business with pleasure; my Facebook friends include relatives, old friends, new pals and purely professional contacts, some of whom I’ve never met personally. You can’t please all the people all the time when you have such a mixed audience, and the privacy settings are too global to adequately address this issue. (My only strategy for Facebook is not to publish things that are too personal. Content strategy is as much about what you shouldn’t publish as it is about what you should.)

But Twitter, for example, is a different story. It’s easy to have separate “personal” and “pro” Twitter accounts. And if you have a pro Twitter account, it’s also easy to apply a content strategy to it. The same is true of professional networks like LinkedIn.

Planning and Governance of Useful, Usable Content

Here are some ideas that might help you get started on a strategy:

• Planning: Define your mission (what you want to achieve with your content). Define your audience. Define what you want your content to do for your audience (inform, persuade, entertain). Define the nature of your content (what it should consist of and the tone of the content). Decide how often to produce it. Decide how you will interact with your audience.
• Governance: In this context, I interpret this to mean managing and monitoring your content and its impact, as well as your own role. Are you meeting your audience’s needs? What’s working and what’s not, and why? Is the quality of your content consistently high? Are you responsive and available?
• Useful and usable: Most of the blogs and Twitter accounts of small businesses I see need a content strategy. They tend to be too inwardly focused, all about their own updates and services (boring), or else they are too much about the owner/founder. These businesses generally need to figure out how to provide some real value to their audiences in order to keep them coming back and turn them into real fans, or even evangelists.

Here’s an example: I discovered a nice app the other day called Memory-Life. It’s a site where you can store media and other files in a virtual “box of memories.” (It’s still only available in French, but hopefully not for long. You can see a demo by clicking “Voir la démo.“)

It has a Twitter account, but it could be doing a lot more. Its audience is interested in preserving memories, so in addition to the occasional updates about upgrades and features, it could share links to articles about repairing old photos, or compressing large video files. It could provide creative suggestions, like “Upload pictures of all your grandmother’s jewelry to your box of memories” or “Create your own art gallery with Memory-Life.” It could suggest alternative uses for the app; designers could use it to create inspiration boards, for example.

If you want to connect with and engage an audience, your content has to provoke thought and action. You know you’re adding value if your content is being retweeted, liked and shared. It takes work, but it’s worth it.

You Too Could Be a Content Strategist!

Content strayegy is a relatively new career field. Large corporations are beginning to have in-house content strategists, but there is no reason why this job shouldn’t be done by consultants, which is where you come in. It could be an ideal occupation for a web worker.

If you’d like to learn ore about content strategy, in April, several chapters of the Society for Technical Communication are putting on “Content Strategy Forum 2010,” a two-day conference on content strategy in Paris. The conference is intended for:

“…anyone who develops, manages, or delivers content within their own organization or for their clients: user experience designers, information architects, business analysts, technical writers, web project managers, documentation managers, translators, web marketers, practicing content strategists, and those looking to break into the field.”

Learn more about the conference program and register here (tickets are very affordable).

Here’s some additional recommended reading on content strategy:

• “Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data,” a great article by Rachel Lovinger
• There are several good articles on A List Apart about content strategy.

Have you implemented a content strategy for your social media presence?

Image by the_franz from sxc.hu

While video production may involve location-specific elements where you need to go out to capture visuals and sounds, you can still make it a career where you can work anywhere you want.

Is video production the career for you?

Video Production Careers

In video production, some stick to just one task, while others do several things, or even do all the jobs to take a video from start to finish. Here are a few video-related jobs:

Producer: Video businesses vary in the area of production based on the type of videos they create and the topics they cover. Producers may specialize in one or several different types of video. The title “producer” has many meanings, but a producer often oversees the entire video production process.

Post-production: Folks in post-production work with existing video to enhance it, edit it and add to it. These tasks could involve animation, audio, voice-overs, DVD menus, music and graphics.

Editor: Editors compile audio and video to create the final product that meets project requirements. “The editor is much like a cook. We take raw ingredients and combine them artfully into a video that meets the clients’ goals,” says Ed McNichol of EDcetera.

How to Qualify

Video producers and editors are a diverse lot when it comes to how they first entered the video business and gained experience. Tim Clark started on Ken Burns’ documentaries in the editing room. Jack Dever, director of post production at PACSAT,  literally started on the bottom floor by sweeping in a studio before and after shoots. After that, he climbed to assistant video editor, editor, producer, director and supervisor. Many folks in video started at the bottom and worked into jobs in the field.

Kim Brame, executive producer with creative illusions Productions, took every job available to her after college to build a network and learn the craft. Her coworkers have degrees and training in audio engineering, programming, graphic design and animation.

Steve Mann, owner of MannMade Digital Video, lost his job in the dot-com bust. “Over 50 and no higher degree made me virtually invisible in the collapsed high-tech job market. Since my passion was always photography and more recently videography, doing what I enjoy seemed like the best career move,” Mann says.

Vicky Poole didn’t start at the bottom. Rather, she started in a different job as a secretary working for a post-production company. Her boss gave her opportunities to work with equipment and on smaller projects.

A handful of folks say they received a college degree in mass communications, media, film production or something similar. But these same people say that job experience is what really matters. In terms of gaining skills, many say they just learned how to use the software and practice often. No matter where you are in your video career, everyone has benefited from attending seminars and trade shows. Jeff Davis of JD Savage Productions says, “Do what you love, and never stop learning new stuff.”

“There is a balance of technical aptitude and creativity,” says Tom Hinchey of HincheyStudios LLC. Not only do video producers need to know the technical side of things, but also how to create the message the video must communicate.

A person who knows how to use all the video production equipment and tools doesn’t always have the knowledge and skills to be a full-fledged video producer. “You need to first know how to be a storyteller. This is one of the key components that people don’t understand with video,” says David Spark of Spark Media Solutions.

Video Production Tools

Video production involves a long list of tools. After all, you can’t capture sound and visuals without cameras and microsphones, or put all the footage together to tell a good story without apps.

The following popular tools are a smattering of what the professionals use: Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, HD cameras (especially Sony and Canon), AVID, Adobe Creative Suite, Affect Effects and Premiere. Some also use mics, lighting, DVD authoring and scripting tools. Of course, many use a Mac computer to do their work. They often post their videos on web-based video services like YouTube and Vimeo.

Find Clients

Word-of-mouth and happy current clients rule the roost as the best way to get business. Networking both in person and on social network sites works well. Some do formal marketing or post on craigslist. Video producers create a portfolio for their web sites. “Gone are the days of DVD reels. If a client wants instant access to your portfolio, your website can help you lock in that client instantly,” says Kico Velarde.

Crystal Pyramid Productions’ Patty Mooney not only uses a web site and networks, but also finds clients through the Chamber of Commerce, search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising in online and print directories. Another way to break in the field is to volunteer to get experience and build your portfolio.

Thomas Hoebbel took the old fashioned approach by connecting with organizations that could benefit from his work, and they hired him. Some people like Clint Till of Parc Entertainment, Inc. hand out demo reels on DVD and make cold calls.

Would you consider a video production career?

He knew of the company, met multiple times with different team members, had been taken on a tour of the office space, and was happy with the offer they’d negotiated. It all looked good. But before he jumped in and signed up, he made one final check that all web workers should undertake.

He called a friend of his who used to work for the company to get the inside story on what it’s like there.

His friend had left the company, but he trusted her opinion, so he spent an hour discussing the company culture, the attitude to various aspects of the work that were important to him, what she’d liked and disliked about working there, and so on. In some ways, this conversation was almost like a sort of reverse job interview. And it confirmed many of his thoughts on the organization while alerting him to other aspects of the place and people that he hadn’t been aware of.

By the end of the conversation, he felt he had a clearer, real-world view of his potential employer from someone who knew the company well, yet had no personal or business interest in whether or not he took the job. And he decided to accept the position.

How to Find Out What It’s Like On the Inside

Obviously it’s important to get to know the company you’re considering working for as best you can. But if you haven’t had any experience with the organization yourself (for example, as a customer or client), you may fear you’ll be left with its web site and your interviewer as your only sources of information.

There are a few other ways you can research your potential employer. The first is, of course, to ask someone who’s worked at the company how they enjoyed their time. Of course, their reasons for leaving the place may skew their answers to your questions, but this is a good starting point — if you know such a person. If not, don’t worry: there are other tactics you can use to get past the company sales pitch and find out what life’s like on the inside.

Speak to a Current Employee

Ask if you can speak to another person who works for the company about what it’s like there. You might suggest this to your potential employer as a way to get a feel for the company culture from an objective party who doesn’t care whether you join the organization or not. Of course, you’ll want to keep in mind that the details of your conversation may well be fed back to the staff that are considering hiring you.

But spending half an hour with someone who works in the organization can be a useful way to gain insight into the way the place functions, how it demonstrates that it respects and values staff and clients, and so on.

Speak to a Current or Past Client

If you were considering contracting your potential employer to do some work for you, you’d undoubtedly check their references. So why not do the same if you’re considering working for them? Most organizations will already have a few referees on hand for prospective clients to speak with, and they may be happy for you to speak to one of these individuals.

Speaking to a client can give you an insider’s view of how the company treats clients and delivers its services. You may gain insight into the processes the company uses to manage clients and complete projects, or the swiftness with which is responds to client complaints, inquiries, and reported technical issues. Again, keep in mind that the details of this conversation may well be reported back to your potential employer.

Review Community Discussions

Most company web sites have a blog, discussion forums, reader comments or a combination of these. Check these sources to see how the company deals with its audience, responds to their comments and thoughts, and deals with negative feedback.

The way a company interacts with its public online may give you rare insight into deeply-held attitudes that underlie the company culture, as well as things like complaint resolution procedures, how involved the broader team is with customers and clients, and how open the company is to new ideas, technology, and so on.

These are the methods I use to research potential employers. Have you used any of these approaches — or others — to get a clear view of what your life might be like if you worked for a given employer?

In the corporate world, it’s easy to track positive mobility in your career. You could get a promotion (a move upward to a position of higher rank or pay), or laterally to a position of similar rank, but with different tasks or projects. Advancement in a freelancing career is not so easy to track, possibly because we each have different definitions of what a freelance “promotion” consists of.

Here are some ways you can climb the freelance career ladder:

Rates. The most obvious way to climb your career ladder is to raise your rates as you gain more experience and skills. The quality of your work, client support, and even your online presence should reflect these changes. If you want some tips on how to raise your rates, check out the following resources:

• “How to Raise Your Rates Without Losing Clients” at Freelance Switch
• “How to Increase Your Rates for the New Year” from Men With Pens

Of course, just relying on increasing your rates has its limits. Just because you’re increasing your hourly rate by $5, it doesn’t mean that you’ll eventually get away with charging $1,000 per hour. The good news is that there are other ways to give yourself a “promotion.”

Projects and clients. One of the signs that you’re doing well as a freelancer is that you occasionally turn down projects. Still, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should only take on projects with a bigger scope or work only with high-profile clients. What’s important is to look out for new projects that we’re passionate about. This could mean the following:

• Taking on projects that will allow you to learn and explore additional skills you’ve always wanted.
• Working with people in an industry or field that you’ve always wanted to get involved with.
• Choosing challenging projects that excite you and allow you to push your work quality a notch higher.
• Having the time and resources to work on passion projects that may not be financially rewarding, but are personally fulfilling.

Tasks. If you take a look at your daily tasks, which ones do you like the least? Out of these, which ones can you automate with an app, delegate to an assistant or subcontract to others? Sometimes, advancement in your career means focusing your time and energy on your preferred tasks.

Leisure. It seems like many freelancers work during the weekends or fail to take some time off. While we may be passionate about our work, it doesn’t mean we can’t professionally benefit from leisure time. In one of his TED talks, Stefan Sagmeister discussed the power of taking time off. The benefits include the following:

• We can pursue creative experiments that we don’t have the time or energy for during the regular work week.
• We get fresh ideas and innovate. This prevents repetition and keeps our work from becoming stagnant.

Learning opportunities. Career mobility should also involve learning new skills and becoming acquainted with developments in your field. You can do this via seminars, workshops, reading materials, and even attending conferences. On a smaller scale, you can subscribe to relevant blogs and sign up for online courses. By pushing ourselves to learn more, we improve the quality of our work, hear new ideas, and interact with other professionals. Business building. For some people, being a lone freelancer isn’t enough. Sometimes we want our jobs to evolve into a business. This doesn’t necessarily mean renting an office or owning a building, but it can mean setting up our own teams, having dedicated staff for client support, or simply getting the right paperwork.

Getting a promotion as a freelancer may not be simple, but as I’ve illustrated with the points above, the freedom and options we have more than make up for that.

How are you climbing the freelance career ladder? Do you do this deliberately or do you find that your career path forges naturally with very little planning?

Image by svilen001 from sxc.hu

To continue the relationship analogy, having a successful and rewarding long-lasting career depends upon more than just initial excitement and chemistry. You have to put work in, think about your goals and make conscious decisions that lead to continuous improvement. Here are some areas to concentrate on.

Focus

If you are starting to feel a little ennui with your decision to do your work remotely, take a look at what you’re doing and make sure the cause is, in fact, the method, and not the nature of the work you’re doing. You might be bored with your focus, not with working online.

You have a couple of options to gauge which is the case, and to find out if you can’t give your web working life a much-needed shot in the arm. First, you could try adding additional work to your existing load that isn’t something you’d normally pursue, but think you might enjoy. Introducing small work packets along with your usual things shouldn’t cause too much strain, and will allow you an exit strategy should you require it.

The other option is to stop doing your existing type of work entirely, and throw yourself fully into something new. This has the disadvantage of being risky, and also of possibly seeming like it fixed the problem when in fact it hasn’t, since you’re just experiencing the thrill of the novel once again.

Motivation

Another reason your web working career might be losing its luster is that you’re not sure what it is that’s driving you to continue. One of the benefits of working for a large company at an office is that HR departments take on motivation as part of their responsibility, and, at good workplaces, take the pulse of their employees and create incentive programs accordingly.

Motivation can be the biggest challenge facing a web worker. Working for bonuses isn’t always an option, nor is working for advancement, in the traditional sense. The best way to get yourself in gear is to identify what it was that drove you to pursue working online to begin with, and see if you can’t find ways to amplify that incentive, or to set goals for furthering it down the road.

Expectations

Finally, you may be experiencing frustration with your web working career because your results aren’t living up to your expectations. Maybe you aren’t making as much as you anticipated, or maybe you aren’t finding that you have as much free time as you thought you would as a result of working remotely.

If so, regaining your passion for your career might be as simple (or as difficult) as reassessing your situation and changing your expectations in order to bring them more in line with the reality you’re experiencing. Any new endeavor will probably seem much more lucrative than it turns out to be, and even when you know your starting salary at a more traditional job, you often don’t take into account taxes, pension, and other deductions. Try to focus more on the positive results you are seeing than on the ones you thought you’d see.

If you’ve hit a wall in your web working career, don’t panic; it’s a good sign. It means you got off on the right foot, and managed to hang in there long enough to become more or less established. As with a successful long term relationship, it’s only natural to get cold feet. Step back, take a breather, reevaluate your situation and continue on. You won’t regret it.

Is your web working honeymoon over? What are you doing to get the spark back?

Photo credit: Neil T

Flowz, the developer behind Raveal, has since introduced a variety of new features to try to up the game of the fledgling web site. Some of these are little more than aesthetic upgrades, but some are substantial improvements that really change the way the site works at its core.

Themes

Raveal now places a strong emphasis on what they call “Your Personal Brand.” It’s a concept not unfamiliar to us here at WebWorkerDaily. Part of that approach, as far as Raveal is concerned, involves letting you show off your skills, work history, and traits using a personalized theme.

Raveal themes work and look a lot like blog themes, for the most part, but some boast impressive features, like Flash integration, that really make them stand out. You can use the default set, create your own using a pre-made layout and some custom CSS, or choose from one of the available community themes (which is a little light on content right now). If you know a little about how CSS works, but aren’t comfortable building your own site from scratch, it’s a good set of tools to have.

I was a little miffed to find that there was no way to preview my profile unless I made it publicly available, which isn’t something I wanted to do before ensuring that my chosen theme would look good with my content. Even just a live preview of the theme in question with generic content would’ve been sufficient.

People Showcase

Want to get noticed? Flowz wants that for you, too. That’s why it introduced the “People Showcase,” a section which shows off the best and brightest of those found in there network. According to Flowz, being highlighted on the Showcase nets you an additional 400 views per month, a number the company says will grow as Raveal gains popularity.

There’s no word on how exactly people are chosen to appear in the Showcase, but in a blog post detailing the new feature, Flowz staff indicates that all you need do to be considered is make your profile publicly viewable. Presumably, staff members comb the public directory for talented individuals with complete, up-to-date profiles.

I like the presentation of the People Showcase, and the idea behind it, but only time will tell how the actual effect it will have on individual member’s career aspirations.

Company Profiles and Job Postings

Probably the biggest new feature is not on the employee side at all, but on the employer’s. Companies looking for prospects can now create a profile complete with a blog feed and job listings.

There’s even a back-end workflow that HR staff can use to manage applicants, allowing them to score potential employees as “Undecided,” “Thumbs Up,” or “Thumbs Down.” They can also keep notes on every application, the content of which can be shared with other staff who are assigned user privileges. Even if you want to share with someone who isn’t a Raveal user, you can do so using a Guest Pass.

Unfortunately, companies can only list one job posting at a time unless they pay for a Pro account, which ultimately hurts job searchers most of all. Hopefully the back-end workflow features prove worthwhile enough that companies end up going the pay route.

New Pro Features

A couple new features were obviously designed to make Raveal Pro accounts more appealing, as they’re only accessible once you switch to a paid account. The first is Voice, which allows you to pull content and comments from your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook, etc. to show off on your Raveal profile in addition to your standard Resumé and Portfolio information.

It’s definitely a bold step, and one that acknowledges that for many professionals working online today, their social media presence is as much a part of their career goals as is their work history. But it’s also risky, since we all know the dangers associated with allowing potential employers access to things like Facebook, which might not always paint you in the best possible light.

You can also now include an audio introduction if you have a Pro account. It’s interesting, but ultimately kind of gimmicky, in my opinion. Though I absolutely hate the sound of my recorded voice, so I might be biased.

One thing’s clear: Raveal is doing its best to stand out from the crowd and bring something truly new to the often arduous task of finding work online. Whether or not the specific things it’s trying are of value to you is another thing entirely. It’s definitely worth a look though, especially if you’re a content producer who isn’t getting anywhere with the established career finding resources online.

Have your tried the new features in Raveal?  Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was working full-time at a consulting firm, dressing in a suit and going in to a physical office five or six days a week. I knew about two months in advance that I would be leaving for sure to pursue working remotely from home as a freelancer. Unlike when you make the transition from one regular job to another, leaving to work for yourself actually requires a lot of preparation.

Test the Waters

Planning to work online from home is all well and good, but if you don’t actually have any work lined up, then you won’t really be doing much besides full-time web browsing.

Having an idea of what type of work you want to do when you start is a good beginning, but it isn’t enough. Because working remotely from home generally allows you considerable flexibility with your working hours, it’s a good idea to actually start before you take the plunge and go for it full-time.

Doing so will not only set you up with work for when you actually do start web working as a career, but it should also let you find out if you’re making the right move. In most cases, when you leave a day job, there aren’t any takebacks. Web work is one of the few situations where you can actually organize a trial period. Take advantage of that.

Pave the Way

Working online as a freelancer has a lot to do with the quality of your work, but it’s also half, or maybe even two-thirds self-promotion. That means significant attention must be paid to identity management, or personal branding, or whatever you want to call it.

Laying down that groundwork well ahead of time means you won’t be started with a blank slate once you hit the open waters of the web, a situation comparable to entering the job market fresh out of school.

That groundwork can consist of well-developed and complete social networking profiles, clips and publications at outlets, including your own personal blog, and relevant conference attendance and participation. If you’ve dabbled in online work part-time, something I mentioned was a good idea above, you’ll also be well prepared to show what you’ve done.

Evaluate Your Finances and Lifestyle

Transitioning to online work can be a lot like starting your own business, because in many ways, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Part of that means expecting and preparing for an unprofitable period while you get your footing. Even if you do line things up and you actually don’t experience any lag time between your old job and your new career, having the peace of mind that comes with making sure your finances can take a hit will help during dry spells.

You should also take a good look at your lifestyle and think about your goals in pursuing a remote career. If you want to do it to make your schedule more flexible and balanced, take some time off work and see if flexibility and balance is actually something you value. It may be that routine suits you best, which might change the type of web work you target.

Also beware the lure of distraction. I found it best to actually minimize the number of things that might cause my attention to stray during the day by keeping the video game consoles in the closet and eschewing a cable subscription altogether.

As with most things, with web working preparation is the key to success. It may be tempting to jump headfirst into something that seems new and exciting, but if you put it off for as long as possible and concentrate on getting your ducks in a row, you’ll be richly rewarded in your new life.

If you’re thinking about taking the plunge into web work, what steps are you taking to prepare yourself?

Photo credit: gill wildman

• In the 2006–07 academic year, 66 percent of the 4,160 accredited US colleges offered college-level distance education courses. (Source: National Center for Education Statistics)
• In fall 2007, 22 percent of U.S. college students took at least one web-based class. (Source: Staying the Course: Online Education in the United States, 2008 from the Sloan Consortium)

Would you believe I have a B.A. in education? Though not a teacher by profession, I’m passionate about education. Perhaps, that’s why I’m a writer — to educate people. Being deaf, I knew I never wanted to teach in a classroom, but I’ve worked with online classes at a major university’s M.S. program. Distance education opens doors for many of us. You can develop expertise in any subject you want.

Online education might make teaching a possible career for those who wouldn’t consider working in a classroom. Is teaching the career for you, or perhaps something you can do on the side?

Types of Teaching Careers

Online programs don’t stop at postsecondary education. School districts offer online classes so students can make up failed classes, get ahead or take extra classes. Professional organizations, specialized schools and programs, community colleges and experts offer non-credit courses for people looking to learn new skills in their professions or hobbies.

I took a handful of online classes through my city’s community college affiliation with Education To Go. The price was right and it helped me conquer QuickBooks and do more with Photoshop.

As an example of the diversity of online learning options and opportunities for teaching posts available, here are some options for writing courses.

• Degree programs: Thomas Edison State College offers a B.A. in Journalism, all done online. Texas Tech has an M.A in Technical Communication.
• College-affiliated resources: Education To Go includes writing courses in its catalog.
• Experts: Professionals with teaching experience, like Christina Katz, conduct email classes. While you can go off and create your own courses to teach like Katz does, you still need to do marketing and earn credibility to encourage people to sign up with you when you’re not affiliated with a college or known organization.
• Online publications and resources: AbsoluteWrite, a popular resource for writers, gives instructors a space to teach their classes. While AbsoluteWrite and its staff don’t teach the classes, it allows credible professionals to affiliate themselves with the respected AbsoluteWrite name.
• High schools: My local independent school district offers English classes in its eSchool.

How to Qualify

For college programs, you typically need at least a Master’s degree and others require a PhD. Danielle McIntosh, White River Online teacher, teaches at a local district’s public online high school that serves students all over Washington State. Before working there, she had 10 years of teaching special education. “Boise State University offers a certificate program for online teaching. However, almost everything has been on-the-job training in my situation,” McIntosh says.

Author Christina Katz believes that credibility is the first qualification to becoming a teacher. “Credibility can come from degrees, experience, word-of-mouth and having been published on your topic of expertise. When it comes to credibility, I don’t think it comes from any one thing but the accumulation of many things — especially what others say about you,” she says.

Teaching Tools

Each online program has a preference as to what application or system it uses as the base for its courses. Some use a third party solution while others create their own system.

Tools of the trade include email, headsets for online lectures/webinars, Microsoft Word and Excel for reviewing student work and tracking grades. Depending on the course type you teach, you may need specific tools or applications. One course I worked with used a web-based simulator where students entered decisions and could see the results of their actions. Danielle McIntosh uses Moodle as well as APEX and PLATOWeb for content.

Find Opportunities

Margaret Garcia recommends looking for posts through the web sites of online colleges or programs. She points out that some schools have stringent hiring requirements while others don’t. “Most people break into online teaching through University of Phoenix — they have an easier hiring process and though they don’t pay well, they are willing to give a break to a possible good teacher. Cappella University, on the other hand, is one of the hardest,” Garcia says. She works with as many as five different online universities including National University and Kaplan University.

In “Get Known before the Book Deal,” Christina Katz recommends starting locally in the classroom with live students to gain experience before teaching online. She suggests looking into organizations, conferences, local meetings and events and adult education centers. While this takes away the web working aspect, it’s just for a short time with places near you. Not only research the sites of those offering online classes, but also remember to network and seek out other teachers who might have insight to offer and decision-makers behind the programs.

Would you consider a career in education?

Photo credit: LittleMan

The science of marketing involves market research, segmenting the market and building and executing a marketing plan that fulfills business goals.

People in public relations (PR), on the other hand, work to get exposure for the brand, the organization and its people in the media. Although the lines blur between the two careers, they are distinct roles.

Is marketing or PR the web working career for you?

Types of Marketing and PR Careers

Not all marketing and PR jobs involve the same roles and responsibilities. Marketing and PR covers many careers, ranging from advertising manager, to media coordinator and brand manager, to social media manager. Here are some high-level job descriptions:

Marketing: Create, plan and deliver the company’s communications program to promote the company, its brand, its products and its services.

PR and Media Relations: PR and media relations professionals target online and offline media to promote their clients’ business or expertise, with the goal of seeing their name, company or product mentioned. Successful workers build relationships with the media, event coordinators and other organizations for partnering and sponsoring activities as well as working to get the company and its people into stories.

Researcher: The researcher investigates the client’s target market, industry and business.

How to Qualify

Like many other web working jobs, many marketers learned their trade in past jobs. Matt Scherer, president of Scherer Communications, spent 20 years in the Air Force working in public affairs, with ten of them as an editor. He also received a second degree in Marketing before founding his firm. “When I went back to college, I worked part-time as a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News and as a producer for KSAT 12. Those jobs helped me to hone my skills and understand how to pitch to the media,” says Scherer.

Before diving into marketing, web marketer Lorrie Thomas worked for an online advertising network. “I learned by doing. I had no choice: sink or swim. I rolled up my sleeves, ate my humble pie, failed a lot and only asked for help after I had tried as hard as I could first,” Thomas says.

Marketing and PR Tools

Many marketers and PR personnel say they rely on social media tools including Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs, along with their cell phones. Like most web workers, their toolbox holds word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and finance applications.

Online meeting applications provide value for meeting with clients and conducting presentations and webinars. Marketers also use email newsletter services.

Find Clients

Referrals and happy customers are how most marketers and PR professionals land gigs. Scherer says that his San Antonio Express-News blog also helped. Hank Stroll of InternetVIZ, a custom business-to-business newsletter publishing company, saw a need among technology companies that struggled to share their value with clients and prospects. His company created a prototype email newsletter, which grew their business from 250 business executives to over 400,000 readers. He has a call to action offering a free prototype, which brings prospects into his sales cycle. In Lorrie Thomas’ case, she wants to fill seats in her virtual classroom. “Most students confess to checking out my web sites before they sign up for my class because they want to see if I know my stuff first!”

Would you consider a marketing or PR career?

Photo credit: Sophie

The real value that employers need to be able to see is in a prospective hire’s ideas. That’s the focus of Brazen Careerist, Trunk’s startup. The site focuses primarily on Generation Y. Trunk points to generational differences as a motivating factor: “Generation Y is surprisingly hard to find and recruit online; Facebook doesn’t work as a professional tool.” Brazen Careerist offers a community that brings people together into a professional community, offering a level playing field for individuals with good ideas but lousy resumes, as well as access for employers.

The community and networking opportunities are at least as valuable as the opportunity for Brazen Careerist’s members to showcase their ideas and abilities. “You’re unemployable without a network,” says Trunk. She points to the fact that while Brazen Careerist started primarily as a blogging community, most members didn’t see as much value in developing traffic for their own blogs as in building connections. It is particularly important in the face of recruiters’ changing strategies. “The recruiting industry is now establishing relationships, so that they know people before a job opens,” she says.

Especially for web workers, Trunk recommends making connecting a priority. Just because you’re working online doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make personal connections. In fact, you may need to work at it even more. “Build flexibility,” says Trunk. “Become a part of the pipeline now, because you don’t know what the future will bring. A job hunt isn’t ‘I need a job now’ — it’s a safety net you build now, for when you’ll need it later.”

Trunk points out that connecting just for the sake of connecting won’t build the network you need. She says, “Social networking is about being kind,” suggesting that to build connections, a person should be looking for opportunities to help other people out. “Not everyone blogs or is a thought leader, but everyone can connect and be kind.”

Brazen Careerist just relaunched, focusing on career management. The site offers a way to aggregate ideas, letting users bring together blogs, Twitter, networking and other elements of their careers, which just don’t show up on a resume. The site also provides opportunities for recruiters looking to hire Generation Y employees. You can also find more information about Penelope Trunk on her blog.

Does your resume fit that traditional format?