Successful freelancing is a matter of finding the right clients in the right places for the right reasons. Every client you take…
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5 Outreach Steps For Winning Better Clients
Creative freelancers invest time and effort carefully crafting brands for their clients. In regard to their own brands, they often come up…
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Why Branding Is Crucial If You Want To Be Profitable
Early in my freelance journey I joined a business networking group through my chamber of commerce for the purpose of generating leads and…
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Leads and Referrals — What’s the Difference?
Q: As a freelancer, is it worth having business listings like Yelp and YP? A: It depends upon what directories you choose and…
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Should Freelancers List With Online Business Directories?
When you're in business (and freelancers are in business), you build reputation through social and in-person networking. According to the Oxford Dictionary,…
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How To Build An Effective Professional Network
We are always marketing. From the quality of our work to how we talk about ourselves, we are constantly sending messages into…
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No-Money Marketing Tips for Creative Freelancers
Did you know that there is more than one way to be a freelancer? Independent creatives — freelancers — can choose a variety…
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What Kind Of Freelancer Are You?
Self promotion is the practice of telling potential clients about what you do. With it you build your brand, engage prospects and…
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Self-Promotion Tips for Creative Freelancers
One of the huge differences between a salaried worker and a freelancer is that freelancers need to always be looking for work.…
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7 Places to Find Freelance Clients Online and Offline
As an independent creative, prospecting is a practical and necessary business activity that needs focused attention to. It requires work to maintain…
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How to Build Your Prospecting Pipeline
The commonly-given advice is: Do what you love and the money will follow. This is a great ideal, because no one wants to…
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Passion or Profit: Should You Start a Freelance Business?
In Part 1 of this article I focused on what a brand is, and the visual and conceptual components of an effective…
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How To Manage Your Brand
branding influence reputation
typographic illustration in reds for Design and Conquer blog post
Of Influence, Time and Trust Branding is a popular discussion in my circles, and in the course of those conversations I gain…
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A Philosophy of Branding, Part 1
Email is the most effective means of reaching your customer base. It's targeted and direct, and recipients have opted in to your…
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The Best Days to Send an Email Blast
Are you more concerned about aesthetics or your bottom line when contracting design services? Designers - good ones - always care about how…
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Should You Care About Aesthetics?
Start-up businesses and organizations tend to hold themselves back in terms of establishing reputation and solidity by under-budgeting and under-investing in the…
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They’ll Notice
Whether you’re a business owner, executive or staff member, business cards continue to play a leading role at events, in business and…
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Optimizing Your Business Card
Non-descript design that lacks distinction will do nothing to add distinction and value to an organization.
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Positioning and Differentiating Your Business Through Design
To be meaningful, design needs to connect on five successive levels of significance…
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5 Stages of Customer Loyalty
How many people set goals and never achieve them? How many creatives start a business and then watch it fizzle out Are…
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The Importance of Knowing Why
Does it matter if a design is good or not? Before we can deal with that question let's ask a more basic…
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Does Good Design Matter?
Practically every business, organization and government has a banner. These are raised in the form of logos, motifs, icons and flags. We wear them and put them on our car bumpers and on signs and travel mugs. Every banner represents something—an identity, a set of values, a reputation, a history.
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How We’re Remembered: Memorial Day 2011
To be promoted in our design-driven culture, a product must be packaged in such a way that it becomes meaningful to the person using it, so that they become an evangelist for it. This requires thoughtful planning and execution of a design strategy
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Loving It: Seduction, Satisfaction and Graphic Culture
How can you invest your product or service with “lovability” and create devotion in your customers? Here are some options: Love it…
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Creating Lovability
Graphic design represents ideas and values. A design is not in itself the idea, but the expression of it. Design points to…
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Design As Your Ambassador
Those who track and analyze cultural trends generally agree that our culture has become design-driven. It's no longer based on business or…
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True Lies
My friend, Mary, was in a community theatre production of The Mikado, and was asked to write her bio for the printed program. This being…
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Being Remarkable
Once you have made the investment in the creation of a company identity – a logo – how should you utilize that…
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Using Design to Build Awareness