Let’s face it. Sometimes while freelancing, the jobs coming will just die down. Other times you’re so swamped, that you have to pick and choose; maybe even turn work away. There’s a simple solution to all of the madness!  Remember that old saying, “One hand washes the other”?

It’s always good to have a network of friends and colleagues to push work back and forth to/from. Remember – one hand washes the other. When you “pay work forward”, it all comes back around. Whoever is too swamped at the time, or doesn’t want to do a particular job, will push it over someone else that might want it. This type of arrangement is highly recommended with regards to any type of freelancing position.  Sometimes you might not want to deal with a certain type of a client.  Dealing with the public can be trying, and not all of us handle certain types of people as well as others.  This is another perfect scenario of why you might want to shoot the job over to your colleague; not to dump them with a jerk of a client, but maybe you know they really could use the work.  “Beggars can’t be choosers”.  Wow, two old school expressions in the same blog post *facepalm*.

Great platforms for building your social work network such are twitter, behance, google+, linkedin; anywhere you can interact and connect with like minded creatives.  It takes constant effort, though.  You’ll need to actually keep in touch with your “creative network” somehow, and make sure you communicate regularly.  You’ll want to remember members of your network, and hope they remember you as well.  Keep each other updated on how busy everyone is, and who is in need of the most work at that present moment.

Do you already have something like this?  Please share your story in the comments section below.

EDIT: 12/20/2011 – don’t bother reading the rest of this post – facebook has already released the timeline!  It only took them 3 more months to make it official

Mashable just posted a great article about how cool the new Facebook timeline profile layout is, and how you can try it out before its public release.  It takes about 5 minutes to set up, but in 8 easy steps your profile could look just like this:

Usually when they announce new changes (or more like, just change it and make us adapt) there is a lot of pissing and moaning across the world wide web.  But, in this instance, I think people are going to be more receptive to this improvement.  As you can see, at the top right we are now given an easy way to “go back in time” in our lives with the timeline feature.  That should be useful for blowing some time on a boring rainy day The layout is more interesting, and it also allowed for a large header or cover photo to go behind your normal facebook profile photo.

Too much of a pain to go through all of the hassle in the Mashable article?  Well, you can wait around another week and the option to try out the new timeline profile layout will be available to everyone then.  But why wait around?  This thing is sweet.  This is definitely something they’re doing to try and make sure they have the upper hand on the world’s fastest growing social network, our beloved Google+.

There are a lot of people that don’t really see the value in having a free Tumblr blog, for a few different reasons.  Maybe you’ve got a pretty hopping WordPress blog already, so why should you need another stupid blog to have to manage?  If you aren’t running a business online, and don’t care about getting more hits and search engine traffic, then Search Engine Optimization (SEO) probably isn’t on the top of your list of concerns.  If you just want a basic blog that is easy to use and post to, then tumblr is amazingly simple and easy to get started.  It’s even easier than a free wordpress.com or blogger.com blog.  This article is mainly considering tumblr as a tool to drive traffic toward your other websites.  Here are some reasons why I think tumblr is pretty awesome, as a supplement to your existing website or blog.

1. You get all dofollow backlinks to any url you post on your blog. This is great for SEO and developing quality backlinks.

2. There is an endless stream of cool eyecandy, videos, articles and content that you can reblog. What’s the point in this, if there is duplicate text and content?  Well, when it comes to reblogging articles, I don’t really see the point for SEO.  Google and the search engines don’t take very well to duplicate text.  What they do like, is unique text.  So, if you’re going to reblog a video, photo, or other media – try and rephrase the description and keywords, maybe even the title a bit, so that it’s a little bit different.  It might help for a little while, until people reblog the crap out of it again.

3.  Tumblr reblogs create awesome content for tweets and twitter microblog posts. It’s so simple to set up your twitter account, so that every time you reblog on tumblr, it will tweet the description and the link to the site, photo or video you are reblogging. It’s pretty easy to keep the descriptions under 140 characaters, and makes finding cool content to feed to your followers a cinch.

4.  The viral-ness of tumblr is great if you’re trying to promote your youtube videos, photos, music, and more. If people like what they see, then they will reblog it.  Every time it’s reblogged, it will link back to your original post or website!  Every time I post to tumblr I see it as planting a little seed, here and there.  You never know what’s going to start getting popular.  An important thing for this to be the most effective, however, is having enough followers to get the ball rolling.  Remember that content is key, and if people like your taste, the style of the stuff you post on your tumblr blog, they’re more apt to follow you.

I’m no expert, but those are the conclusions I’ve come to – let me know what you think!  Here’s a link to my tumblr stream – please follow me, and I’ll follow you back.

Are you overwhelmed by the task of maintaining a social networking / social media presence?  Maybe you haven’t even spent much time with it just yet?  In this digital age of information overload,  taking on social media can add a huge segment of tasks to your regular work week.  What many like about twitter and facebook is their ability to generate powerful word of mouth advertising all wrapped up in one package.  On the other hand, twitter and facebook can suck away all of your time if you let them. There is no magic secret that is going to turn twitter or facebook into huge cash cows or lead generators for you.  There are, however, a lot of things you can do in order to make them work for you, and with a minimal investment in time.

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Looking for a great free collection of small, simple icons to link up to all of your favorite social media sites?  Here is a very clean and well rounded icon pack that I just found from Komodo Media.

Here were the icons I found useful, and you might also note that I created one more for the Behance Network, which was missing (in case anyone needs it).