This blog is now one year old and, to celebrate its first birthday, here are 12 posts from the past 12 months that I want to draw your attention to.

So, if you’re a regular reader (thank you!) they will serve as a helpful recap. If you’re new to this blog or an intermittent visitor, I hope you’ll find them useful.

Getting started: 10 tasks to get your freelance business up and running

Take a strategic look: Taking time to work ON not IN your business

How to get more business: 10 ways to get perfect clients

Welcome to guest writer, George Baker, who gives us some handy tips on how to save time and avoid stress by getting our papers into order.

Organization in the work place is essential to effective productivity. A messy desk can lead to frustration and stress when you are unable to retrieve time-sensitive files and important information. It is very easy to become disorganized.

As new projects and assignments are implemented in day-to-day transactions, it can become very easy to pile papers up to file later in the day. What happens most often is that more urgent projects or spontaneous assignments in need of immediate completion get in the way and can distract you from proper filing. This creates a snowball effect. Work continues to pile up, and the result is that of a messy, crowded, disorganized work station.

It’s hard to get your freelance business off the ground when you’re still working full time in your day job.

I recently heard an interesting talk from Cali Bird from Lead the Life You Want to Lead who has written a book about this subject. Here’s the advice she gave:

1. Write an action plan

What things do you need to put in place in order to start earning money as a freelancer? These are things such as devise a marketing campaign, get a website, work out where there are gaps in your knowledge you need to fill etc.

Here are my 14 tips on how to write a successful blog:

1. Be clear why you are doing a blog. Is it:

• to drive traffic to your site?
• to position yourself as an expert?
• to raise your profile?
• to sell stuff (eg: e-books)?
• to air your views?
• all of these?

2. Use WordPress – it’s free and easy to use. There are lots of free plug-ins and free templates. (This is a WordPress blog – although I got a designer to customise it for me so it doesn’t look like an off-the-shelf template.)

3. Use keywords in the headline text, links, browser title, page description and alt tags. That way, you’ll get picked up by the search engines.

Follow your heart, not your head.

Are you tired of your day job and want to start freelancing?

Or have you been made redundant and want to try your hand at going it alone?

Bravo! And welcome to the world of self employment.

The next question you have to ask yourself is: What kind of freelance work should I do?

Answer: Do something you really love doing. Something you have a real passion for and enjoy so much you’d still love doing it, even if you didn’t get paid for it.

For example, if making cakes is your passion, start to make and sell your own. Or if shoes are your passion, start an online shoe company.

Or, if you have gained years of experience as a marketing person but what you really enjoy is imparting the knowledge you’ve learned along the way, why not run marketing courses and workshops?

In my last post about how to find the perfect client,  Pawel Grabowski from Self Employed Cafe left a comment saying “..make sure that you are already known as an expert in your field. All of the above will be dead easy once you are.”

A great piece of advice. So just how do you get known as an expert in your field? Here are some thoughts:

• Start a blog and write instructional posts full of useful information.

• Write a book (and get it published).

• Get yourself invited to speak at events relevant to your industry. And have copies of your book available for people to buy.