How to network online as a freelancer

Networking is an essential part of freelance life, both to keep yourself known that you’re looking for work, but also for meeting other freelancers to swap ideas, tips, potential work and even to have the occasional grumble with. Freelancing can be a lonely experience! Even if you’re based outside of  a city  (London, for example) where lots of … Read more

Social Innovation Camp – 5-7 December 2008

Social Innovation Camp 2 (The Revenge!) was an amazing experience – tiring, draining, seemingly unending, but fun, fulfilling and infinitely rewarding. Around 60 people descended onto 7 different ideas trying to make positive social change to bring them from the glint of an idea into a project that could be taken on past the weekend. The key idea … Read more

How to Become a Freelance Consultant

Becoming a freelance consultant is a dream for many. I’ve been lucky enough to have a successful freelance career as a social media and digital PR consultant for the last few years. There’s been some bumps along the way, but advice and encouragement from a wide range of people enabled me to go it alone … Read more

Online Privacy Issues Need to be Easier to Understand

Online privacy issues are currently difficult to understand. Amid media headlines about NSA, Prism and Snowden, terms such as encryption, Tor and HTTPS are used extensively with the average person expected to keep up  with what they mean and understand how the issues affect them. For people who aren’t technically adept, the message about why online … Read more

How To Have a Decent Digital Diet

(Note: I get the irony of writing about a digital diet on a blog, which you will undoubtedly read on some kind of digital device.) It’s a fact of modern life that we spend most of our days looking at digital screens. From checking tweets on your mobile, to doing email on your laptop, to … Read more

Social Charity Index: 6 ways charities can make the most of social

Two years on from producing the first Social Charity Study, the team at Visceral Business have produced the Social Charity Index 2013, a report looking into how phenomenal and substantial the growth of social and digital media has become among charities in the UK. A few headlines from the report: The average rate of growth in … Read more

How to Get a Job in PR

How to Get a Job in PR is Sarah Stimson’s fantastic book on how to break into the PR industry. The book is a comprehensive guide to finding and keeping the PR job you dream of, answering all sorts of questions you may have about the PR industry and helping with many more that might not have … Read more

How do you nurture your freelance network? 11 effective ways to grow your freelancer contacts

Ah, networking. Otherwise known as "talking to other people about what they do" or "collecting as many business cards / twitter / LinkedIn connections as physically possible". Have you ever read an article about networking that wasn’t full of common sense points and cliché? They mostly describe networking experiences as working something like this: In … Read more

Personal and Professional Development for Freelancers: Learn More to Earn More

When you first go freelance, you’re likely going to build your business on your existing skill set and knowledge. Whether you’re a freelance photographer, web designer or writer, you will have built up the confidence to go freelance as you know you are good – no, excellent – in a particular field. But after a … Read more