In her recent guest post, Francesca Geens sang the praises of upgrading our email to Microsoft’s Exchange Online. Well, I have taken her advice and done exactly that – and I definitely recommend it. Here’s why:

• I can now access all my emails on my iPhone and iPad. That means I can always keep in touch with who is emailing me, even when I’m away from my desk all day or out of the country.

• All my contacts in Outlook are now automatically in my iPhone and iPad. No manual inputting or syncing via cables. And, whenever I update a contact or add a new one, it changes in the other devices, too.

• My calendar is available on all my devices and, again, everything is synced. So, if I change the time of a meeting or add a new one, the information is updated in all three. Same goes for my ‘Tasks’ list. All this without me having to connect – it’s all done wirelessly.
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How do you position yourself as an expert to your prospects, without it costing you a penny?

Answer: LinkedIn.

It’s an easy four-step process.

1. Join groups that your prospects belong to

So, if your main target audience is, for example, photographers, select ‘Groups’ from the top nav bar, click ‘Groups Directory’ and type your keyword phrase into the search box.  In this case, it would be ‘photographers’. All the groups relating to your search term will appear. Browse the ones that you think will be most relevant to you. And that’s not always the ones with the most members.

You’ll find many groups will accept you, even if you don’t fit their profile. For example, my target audience is designers and I belong to a number of creative design groups.

Not heard of Office365 yet? I am sure you will in the coming months as it is Microsoft’s ‘next big thing’ which is currently in Beta and about to be launched soon.

So what is Office365 and why do I think it’s the perfect service for any freelancer? Here are 6 (and a half) reasons to get you thinking:

1. Email, calendar and contacts

Hopefully you won’t be on a POP3 email account – if you are then you should definitely listen up as this is not a great way to manage your email. Even if you are proud to have made the transition to IMAP and you are happy that you can sync your emails between your phone and laptop then you should know that there is an even better way and it’s called Exchange Online.

My guest writer, Deborah Henry-Pollard, wrote a post last week explaining the importance of taking time to consider all the things that could go wrong in your  freelance business.

In Deborah’s free e-book (which you can download from her website, Catching Fireworks) she explains how to do this, so that you’re fully prepared when problems hit.

As she mentioned in her blog post, you need to think of all the things that could go wrong and then come up with 12 solutions to each one – in case the first 11 won’t work for some reason.

So I thought I’d put this to the test and have thought of two possible things that might happen and dreamt up 10 solutions (I couldn’t quite stretch to the suggested 12.)

Guest writer, Deborah Henry-Pollard, explains the importance of undertaking a risk analysis so that you’re fully prepared, should problems hit your freelance business.

With a bit of practice, most of us can put together a plan for a project or a business.  However, if putting together a great plan in which everything works is all that’s needed for us to sail through life, then we would all be millionaires, household names or … add in your own indicator of success.

As a freelancer, with your future and your work life in your own hands, the real key to planning is not just the “in a perfect world” scenario, but the one in which you have also considered all the things which could go wrong.

For example, what do you do when:

• you have a big presentation to a potential client and your child is sick and has to be off school
• you are due to deliver a workshop and you start to lose your voice
• you are writing a article for a newspaper against the clock and your laptop dies
• your key client, who provides the bulk of your income, doesn’t renew your contract
• your comfortable timeframe get truncated because you have to wait for other people to get their parts of the project back to you
• you have two bad payers who owe you a lot of money and it is impacting on your cashflow
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