In my last post, How to Land a Freelance Gig With a Web Agency, I mentioned the love/hate relationship some agencies have with freelance developers. On one hand, they are an invaluable part of the feast and famine cycle of our industry. But they also bring with them risks, which is why agencies tend to screen freelancers pretty closely. But once you, the freelancer, have your foot in the door, you’d probably like to keep it there – and get the rest of your body in as well. For many freelancers, nothing beats being sent regular, well-paying work without having to make cold calls, respond to RFPs or hand-hold clients.

There are many, many perks to being a telecommuter or remote worker. But there are challenges as well, and one of those is the risk you take when you have your clients’ sensitive data on your computer. As a remote worker, the data you store on your machine can be your livelihood, and losing it could be extremely painful financially and professionally. But just as important as not losing it is not letting it get into the wrong hands. It’s amazing how much information is worth these days, and data security is paramount. So what can you do to protect your clients’ data while it resides on your computer? Hide it on the internet One option for those who know they’ll always have remote access to a server is to keep all their data off their workstation. The primary drawback to consider with this option is that a loss of connection will prevent you from working. Secondly, lag could become a problem too. Even with today’s networks, working off entirely remote files can be quite slow.

Do you have an opt-in email list?  A recent survey by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa, called the “Spam Complainers Survey,” revealed some reasons why people mark certain messages as “spam” – even when they are not spam by definition (unsolicited and unwanted email).  56% feel email from known senders is spam if it’s “just not interesting to me” 50% believe “too frequent emails from companies I know” is spam 31% are irked by “emails that were once useful but are not relevant anymore” This research should make email marketers nervous — opt-in subscription is not enough.

Harvest is, in our opinion, an indispensable web app for small businesses. It makes it easy to do what most small businesses struggle with: keep track of time and expenses. Harvest has an enviable lineup of features, including the ability to track time while you work, log expenses, invoice clients and more. They also have a great user interface, but the truth is that work happens everywhere and at ever hour, and sometimes it might not be ideal or convenient to go to the website to use the application. Fortunately, the Harvest team is in tune with the needs of small businesses. They created an excellent REST-style (REpresentational State Transfer) API for developers to enable the creation of 3rd-party applications. This opened a whole new world of possibilities regarding what can be done with the data and the service itself. Here at ImageX Media, we decided that a company-branded, reports-style site would work great for our clients and team members.