About Taiyab Raja

Posts by Taiyab:

How To Get More Freelance Gigs Using Viral Marketing

Many startup freelancers ask us how to get more clients – it’s the question that’s on everyone’s mind. While marketing and spreading the word about your services yourself is a good way to go about this, nothing beats getting others to spread the word about your services. Yes, it’s true, other people can and will market your services naturally, you just have to hit the right keys – and here are the keys you need to hit.

Read more

How To Stay Inspired And Refreshed As A Freelancer

When you work as a freelancer, especially in the design and writing field, keeping your inspiration vivid, active and fresh is hard work. You can always get bogged down with work, start panicking, and then lose all sense of inspiration and motivation in the process. Well, to save you from this catastrophe, we’ve put together this article titled ‘How To Stay Inspired And Refreshed As A Freelancer’.

Read more

Service Review: Laptopical

Recently, I stumbled upon a great service called Laptopical – so I decided to do a short review on it.

Overview
Laptopical is a brilliant resource for people who are looking for a new laptop to replace their old, worn machine. It’s for people who live in the US (I’m assuming from the currency symbols), and is great when it comes to looking for honest, solid reviews on what laptops are worth it, and which ones are “not so worth it”. Personally, I’m looking for a new machine to replace my rather old laptop, preferrably something with a good amount of RAM and can run Windows Vista (yes, Windows VISTA) without breaking a sweat – so let’s see how laptopical does in my search for a new laptop.
Read more

Home Office: Adrian Diaconescu

As part of the “Send Us a Picture of Your Home Office” series, we’re featuring the home offices of budding freelancers whom submit their office pictures to us. Today we’re looking at Adrian Diaconescu’s new home office.

Read more

Freelance Bootcamp #4: How To Establish Your Freelance Business

This is the fourth edition to the  Freelance Bootcamp series.

As a freelancer, you’re essentially a “one-man” business – although you may work in partnership with other freelancers (which is what I do) it’s still a lot about yourself, and how you conduct yourself when dealing with clients, deadlines, and the whole shebang. The fact that you’re a single person business does affect branding and establishing yourself as an industry professional quite a bit.

Here are a few tips and tricks to help you on your way of establishing your freelance business.

Read more

The Freelancer Pricing Conundrum

Whether you’re looking to get into freelancing, or in the thick of it, there always exists the topic of rates a freelancer should charge for his/her work. People adopt various methods of pricing their service, from hourly rates to one-time project fees. But how do you price yourself just right so you’re not too expensive and you’re not too cheap? Should you undercut the current market and work in bulk, or should you charge a little higher and take on less projects? After all, two of the great successes in retail are ASDA (for you Americans, it’s owned by Walmart) which is a supermarket which aims to keep the lowest prices possible, and Selfridges & Co, one of the much more expensive luxury stores in the UK. Well, let’s dig a little deeper into the topic and see what we can uncover.

Read more

9 Brilliantly Designed Portfolio Websites

A lot of us spend hours upon hours creating and tweaking our online portfolios. Some of us update regularly, some of us don’t. Some of us ponder over the slightest details, whilst others don’t care – but crafting a brilliant portfolio is definately an art which takes time, dedication, and skill.

In this article, we present 9 Brilliantly Designed Portfolio Websites – so you yourself can see what makes a portfolio great.

All choices have been hand-picked from hundreds and hundreds of portfolios which we have encountered over the years, so it should be a very nice selection indeed. We’ve probably missed out a few we should have included – please don’t hesitate to send us recommendations via the comments at the bottom.

Read more