Now that we are well into the second quarter of the year, how much progress have you made so far to achieving your freelance goals for 2013?

If you made goals in January but you put the piece of paper you wrote them on away in a drawer, now is the time to find that piece of paper and remind yourself what your goals actually were.

If you haven’t yet done so, write a list of every little task you need to do to help turn your goals into reality.

For example, if it’s to ‘launch a new website by September’, some of the items on your list might be:

• Write a brief for the designer
• Appoint a designer
• Write the text (or appoint someone to write it for you)
• Choose images
• Etc etc
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Welcome to guest writer, Mark James.

Since its inception in 1969, the internet’s changed the world considerably. Nearly every facet of our everyday lives has been thrust onto the web. We get our news online, we socialise online, we shop online… heck some of us even find love online.

I would guess that the majority of freelancers work from home and spend a large part of the day on their own, working away in splendid isolation. Does that sound like you?

Here are some ways you can avoid feeling lonely:

1. Get out and about

Once a week, make sure you arrange to meet a friend for coffee or for lunch. And, rather than spend all day in your home at your desk on your own, why not go and work in a café?

This week’s blog post contains tips, cheat sheets and infographics to help with your social media campaigns.

• This link will enable you to access a series of social marketing cheat sheets for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest & Instagram, Blogging and Google+.
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When you’re freelance, you need to get used to the feast and famine syndrome. One month you are so busy, you aren’t sure how you can cope with the workload and the next there isn’t a sniff of work on the horizon.

And, no matter how well you try to plan your schedule, you will always get a feast followed by a famine. Regular workloads that keep you ticking along just nicely never seem to happen.

The natural reaction when you enter a period of famine is to panic. But remember the old adage of ‘what you focus on you get more of’. So try not to panic.

Here are some things you could do when you’re not sure where the next project is going to come from:    

Thanks to Alicia Cowan, I have learned a great way to make my Facebook page posts look more engaging and visaully appealing. I use Picmonkey.

So, while my page updates used to look like this (and rarely got any interaction):

They now look like this: