As 2011 draws to a close, I’ve been revisiting the posts I have written during the course of the year and thought you might find it useful to read my Top Ten choices from over the past 12 months.

Five ways to achieve your freelance goals for 2011

Three tips for progressing the goals you set for 2011

Nine ways to improve your cashflow

14 tips for a successful blog

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

As this is (drum roll…) my 100th blog post, I’ve taken a look through my archive to highlight 10 articles that you might want to take another look at.  (Or read for the first time if you are fairly new to this blog.)

1. Getting started: Are you thinking about going freelance?

2. Financial matters: 10 ways to keep on top of your finances

3. Getting more work: How to get clients to buy more of your services

These are real things that clients – and potential clients – have said to me over the years. And you can see why the potential clients didn’t turn into actual clients.

‘Sorry it’s taken us so long to go through the copy. However, we can’t move the deadline, so can you turn it round for us really quickly?’

‘I really like your work but you’re too expensive for me. Can you recommend anyone cheaper?’

‘I know it’s Friday lunchtime but can you work over the weekend and get this to us on Monday morning?’ To which I replied: ‘No problem. I charge double for weekend working.’ To which the client replied: ‘I’m sure it can wait until Wednesday.’

‘Thanks for your quote. Now can you give me a really good discount?’

‘Sorry we haven’t paid you yet but we posted a new cheque book to our accounts lady and the postman’s cart was stolen.’

I read an excellent report last week on video blogging from Gideon Shalwick. He explained how easy it is to make videos for YouTube and for your blog, even if you don’t have a camera. His suggestion was to use screen capture software called Camtasia (for PC users) or Screenflow (for Mac users), so you can easily record from your computer screen and then do a voice over.

Since I don’t have Camtasia and haven’t yet dabbled around with editing audio files, I thought I’d go down an even simpler route. Here are three 30-second slide shows I did over the weekend and uploaded to my YouTube channel.

Welcome to guest blogger, Julia Wherrell, who explains how she went about getting business when she first started out as a freelancer. She also shares her top ten ‘dos’ and ‘dont’s’ of freelancing.

I became a freelance by accident. It’s not uncommon, I know. Many of us end up here thanks to redundancy, and that’s what happened to me too.

Fortunately, I’d always fancied being my own boss so starting up on my own at 24 was scary, but exciting too. I found the daily discipline of being at my desk by 9am not too difficult and I started looking for new business to go with my smart new business suit and shiny new Apple Mac (complete with an amazing 512k memory – but that was 25 years ago, and another story altogether).