These last few months have seen me work on numerous site launches, email newsletters and courses for my clients.  I have never been busier. But there’s no denying that starting up is tricky when budgets are particularly tight for clients.

This is a round-up of some recent articles and forthcoming courses that look helpful, whether you’ve chosen to go freelance or are forced to be self-employed (in other words, have been made redundant).

Always full of insight, David Airey, has recently written on:
Becoming a self-employed graphic designer
The design pricing formula

Nick Usborne has written extensively on freelance web writing. Some recent excellent articles and sites from Nick:
New Path to Riches blog
Freelance Writing Success

NMK (New Media Knowledge) run courses on setting up a web business. This one on March 10 looks good:
Drumming up Business – sales tactics for the digital freelancer
And NMK have a case study: Building a Web Business from Scratch
Follow NMK on Twitter.

Freelance Advisor have an excellent free 32-page guide to download: Go Freelance 2010
Freelance Advisor also have a podcast series, February 2010 was on The Challenges of Working from Home.
Follow Freelance Advisor on Twitter.

If you have any tips then put them in the comments.

Government has the data.

Some useful mashups have been made with Government data, for example there’s a useful recycling map on Recyclenow.com.

Here’s a Google Map, made by the British Government, the UK Met Office and the British Antarctic Survey, showing the effects of global warming.

Sutton Council’s Grit Bins Map was useful a few weeks ago during the South’s heavy snow.

To help people make the most of government data, a major new website has been launched which gives free access to government data in one place: data.gov.uk

I’ll keep you posted on the innovative uses of this data. At the moment some developers are complaining that they can’t make use of the data easily.

In the meantime, here’s some of my favourite mashups:
Newsmap
Healthmap
Weatherbonk
Trendsmap

Here’s a useful introduction to Sidewiki:

Here’s some examples of how it’s been used:

• John Maeda, President of RISD, adding to Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
• Michael Roizen, Cleveland Clinic physician, adding to CDC website about flu shot myths.
• Lonely Planet journalist Tom Hall recommends the Scottish Football museum.
• ProPublica General Manager Richard Tofel gives context by quoting ProPublica author Christopher Favelle on an article they featured.
• See many other examples by following googlesidewiki on Twitter.

Here’s my screencast showing how to see the comments:

The comments are not controlled by the site owner. Some organisations I’ve recently talked to are fearful of this lack of control. Others point out that conversations could be going on outside of the usual blog comment systems set up by bloggers. This BuzzMachine article and the accompanying Sidewiki comments are a useful contribution to the debate.

What can you do?

If you have a Google Webmaster Account – and have therefore proven that you are the site owner – you can write a special entry that will remain at the top of the comments. Just sign into Google, click the Sidewiki button on your browser and leave a short comment that everyone will see.

You should also closely monitor what’s being said before wading in there and replying to the comments. Thankfully Google makes Sidewiki comments available to anyone with an RSS reader (Firefox, Google Reader, My Yahoo etc). All you do is subscribe to this feed:

http://www.google.com/sidewiki/feeds/entries/domainpath/www.YOURDOMAIN.com%2F/default?sortorder=updated&includeLessUseful=true

I’ve subscribed not just to feeds for domains that I manage for my clients, but to other interesting domains such as The Guardian, The BBC, The European Union, Google …

Just after lunch, whilst teaching my Search Engine Optimisation course at Book House, we were told to quickly gather together our things and leave the building, as there was a strong smell of gas downstairs.

So I grabbed my memory stick – it has all my passwords on it – and the remaining handouts and left the building with my delegates. I suggested that we go to the Huguenot Graveyard behind Book House and finish the subject we had started looking at. But it was too wet to find anywhere for us to sit. We made it onto the traffic island and were about to go to the East Hill pub to continue, when we were directed to the Steam Bar over the road. We found a little private dining room at the back of the restaurant, removed the glasses and napkins from the tables and carried on.

No computer and no Internet connection.

Now 12 years ago the thought of teaching a course about that most interactive of web services, search engines, without an Internet connection, let alone a computer, would have filled me with horror. But a kind of ‘Blitz spirit’ kicked in amongst the delegates and I. We vowed to carry on. I ‘drew’ my examples in the air. Thankfully the delegates had good imaginations and a lot of experience with using search engines and could imagine my examples and diagrams.

After being accompanied by gentle folk music for half an hour the music was turned off and we offered tea, coffee and biscuits. Thanks to the kindness of the staff at The Steam Bar I carried on and successfully finished teaching for the rest of the afternoon. Teaching will never be the same again.

The approach usually involve combining search engine optimisation and social media marketing tactics. There are two aspects to this:

1. Social network discovery via search

Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.

2. Ability to attract links for improved SEO

The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in many relevant inbound links.

Social media SEO tips

Find out where your audience is interacting and sharing content.

Over the coming weeks I’ll look at SEO and blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.

A plug for my partnership with Web Editor Nancy Duin:

The Thing Itself (TTI) is a partnership skilled in web organisation, content, design and training. We specialise in:

• expert critiques of websites, to identify why they may not be achieving their aims and how this can be put right
• training in website writing, editing and structure tailored to each client’s needs
• combined critique and training that enables clients to identify where their websites are going wrong and quickly get their staff trained to rectify this.

We are also hugely experienced in writing, editing and designing websites that work, and can help clients focus on their users through scenarios and personas.

In addition, clients come to us for the creation and maintenance of email newsletters and for training in and consultancy on search engine marketing. Finally, we have on tap an impressive array of expertise in all areas of website creation – editorial, technical, aesthetic – to meet all our clients’ needs.

10 tips for conference presentations

Recorded at the Theatre Royal in Chatham a few days before it was demolished in May 2009.

21.36 minutes long.

Final Curtain at the Theatre Royal from Dave Wise on Vimeo.