It’s thanks to peer referrals that I went from having absolutely no work lined up when I left my full-time job as a magazine editor to having a full plate of regular work with relatively little effort on my part. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had to consciously go out looking for work.

Some of this I can attribute to lucky breaks – I was in the right place at the right time. But looking back I see patterns in how I go to this position, and all of it leads back to industry peers recommending me to editors and publications that they already had a strong relationship with. As the editor knew the person referring me (and most likely offered them the assignment in the first place), I was able to start writing for publications that I wouldn’t have been able to crack into if I had introduced myself to them off my own steam.

So how do you go about getting peers to refer you? Three things:

1. they need to know who you are
2. they need to know what your specialty is
3. they need to know that you’re good at what you do

Introducing yourself to peers can be done a number of ways.

• Join the relevant industry mailing lists and forums and contribute to discussions so peers know what your expertise are.
• Make it a habit of attending industry events so they get used to your face and remember you for the next time a work opportunity comes up.
• Become an active commenter on their blogs.

In any creative industry, there are hundreds of hungry freelancers that are all keen for work. In my experience, peers are more likely to refer you if you can establish yourself as an expert in a particular niche. There’s always going to be someone better-qualified and with more experience than you in general, but if you promote yourself as the go-to person for a particular type of work (in my case it was gadget reviews), you’ll have a better chance of getting that referral.

Peers aren’t going to risk tarnishing their reputation by recommending someone whose work they’re not familiar with. Published work overcomes this hurdle easily, but there’s no shame in reminding peers what you’ve been working on the next time you see them at an industry function. I’ve found it’s a good icebreaker to first ask what projects they’ve been working on for the past few weeks, and then reciprocating with what you’ve been doing. They don’t even need to see your work first-hand, but knowing that you’ve been published in print or online boosts your credibility and it’s something they’ll remember the next time they’re in a position to refer someone.

Have you had any big assignments come about from a peer referring you to a client?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

The 26-year-old writer, Rebecca Campbell, is quoted in the press release:

I’m really excited about the trip but I am sure it will be hard to keep moving. The great thing is I have a whole online community to rely on who can guide me to make the right decisions on what I eat and how I keep moving in any of the 15 countries I will be in.  I am sure I’ll need a holiday afterwards!  Travelling can be a bit lonely but with Skype, I know I can stay in touch with my friends and family for free or very little and that’s very reassuring.

Rebecca’s blog can be found here, where she posts photos and travel tips, and bemoans the difficulty of finding Internet connections while constantly on the move.You also reach her via Skype (username: theskypenomad) and Twitter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview
• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

In a previous article, I covered tips for getting more from BlackBerry email. One application I didn’t mention is Jott for BlackBerry, which is an extension of its main service that lets you reply to messages using your voice. Jott transcribes your verbal message to text before sending it on to the recipient and includes a link in the email to hear the voice recording in case of transcription errors. The Jott voice recognition engine is amazing – even my laid-back Aussie drawl, which is usually a challenge for anyone out of the country to understand, let alone a machine, was transcribed with 100% accuracy.

eOffice

eOffice is the only document editor for BlackBerry currently available, but its real killer feature is integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Using this program, you can open and edit files in your online account, as well as save files you’ve created on the BlackBerry directly to your Google account. But it still needs work: in my testing, the connection would time out more times than not, or throw up errors that the document I was trying to open was empty or invalid.

RDM+

Another means of accessing files that aren’t stored locally is RDM+, a remote access program that lets you connect to your PC, navigate your desktop using the BlackBerry’s trackball and keyboard, run programs and transfer files between your BlackBerry and PC. Using it over an EDGE connection is interminably slow, but it’s easy to set up and pays for itself the first time you leave an urgent file on your PC and don’t have any other means of retrieving it.

PocketDay

If you use your BlackBerry for time management, PocketDay is a must-have as it aggregates all of your PIM items and unread messages into a single screen. I’ve never subscribed to the idea of having tasks and appointments in separate applications – I need to see all of my meetings and to-do items in one place so I can organize my time effectively, and PocketDay provides that functionality, in addition to letting you save individual emails as actionable appointments or tasks and view other information like weather, stocks, world time and RSS feeds on one screen.

JiveTalk

If you use IM for chatting with colleagues and clients, JiveTalk will make your life a lot easier. It works across all major IM platforms, supports file transfers and chat transcripts (and even lets you email transcripts for a permanent record of discussions), and makes it easy to switch between multiple chat windows.

BlackBerry Call Screener

Finally, I’ve found BlackBerry Call Screener indispensable for managing my calls. When I’m ‘in the zone’, I don’t like being interrupted with phone calls, and rather than turn my BlackBerry off altogether, I can set up Antair CallScreener to block all calls save for people on my ‘whitelist’ (mainly my partner and family) – anyone else can send me an email or leave a voicemail! Other options in the program include blocking all calls, blocking all calls save for people in your address book, and allowing all calls except for people on your blacklist.

Got any other BlackBerry applications you can recommend? Let’s hear about them in the comments.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2
• Rogue Devices: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 1

Note: this article is written for BIS users running BlackBerrys with OS 4.2.

How to Turn Email Off
One thing that’s irritated me about BlackBerrys from day one is the inability to turn off email delivery. No wonder there are so many ‘CrackBerry’ addicts out there!

But there are a few workarounds. To stop receiving email, turn off the data connection by going to Manage Connections > Mobile Network Options and switching Data Services off. Any email sent to your BlackBerry while this is turned off will be queued up and downloaded as soon as you turn data back on.

The downside is that this turns off Internet access altogether. If that’s inconvenient, another option is logging in to your carrier’s BlackBerry Internet Service website from a PC, clicking on the filter icon for the email accounts you want to disable, and selecting ‘Do not forward messages to device.’ With this method, any email sent to that account is not sent to the BlackBerry even after you re-enable message forwarding.

Finally, you can turn your BlackBerry off altogether. Go to Options > Auto On/Off and select the times on weekdays and weekends for automatically turning the BlackBerry on and off.

Bonus tip: Turn off email notification sound and LED flashing by going into Profiles, scrolling down to Advanced, selecting the active profile (Normal by default), then selecting Edit from the pop-up menu.

Get More out of Your Inbox
Considering that email is the BlackBerry’s main drawcard, the lack of frills in the email client is disappointing. You can add more features to the Messages program using BBSmart Email Viewer – a must-have if you process a lot of email from your BlackBerry. Features include clickable URLs, embedded images, email templates, and the ability to add notes to individual emails and even add emails as tasks or appointments. I’ve only been using this program for a couple of days, and already I can’t imagine reading email on my BlackBerry without it.

The latest BlackBerrys support viewing email attachments in their native format, but how about creating and editing documents? Personally, I’ve been using a Windows Mobile smartphone for four years, and while I’ve viewed hundreds of Word documents and PDFs, I’ve never actually needed to edit or create any on a smartphone.

Naturally your mileage may vary, and if this is something you need to do in your line of work, eOffice lets you view, edit and create Word documents (as well as view PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, faxes and Excel spreadsheets).

If you can hold off a couple of months, version 4.5 of the BlackBerry OS is slated to introduce native Microsoft Office document editing via Dataviz’s Documents To Go software.

Bonus tip: Mark all of the email in your inbox as read by pressing ‘t’, clicking the menu button and select ‘mark prior opened’. Selecting ‘delete prior’ clears out your entire inbox.

Stay tuned for the next instalment, where I cover third-party BlackBerry applications that transform it from a device designed mainly for mobile email to a fully-capable smartphone.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2
• Rogue Devices: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 1

As a web worker, a large part of my day is spent in my inbox, so it wasn’t a decision I made willy-nilly. When the new version of Yahoo Mail was launched, I gave it a try and was won over by its resemblance to a desktop email client. Drag and drop actions, support for right-click context menus and a well-designed and attractive interface are all features that had me thinking the grass was greener on the Yahoo side.

I was also attracted by the promise of unlimited email storage and support for up to 20MB of attachments with the Yahoo Mail Plus subscription. And little things, like the prompt that appears after you email someone that isn’t in your addressbook that asks if you want to add them, and the ability to organize email into folders. So I made the jump to Yahoo Mail, and I’ve been ruing it ever since.

The biggest issue I have with Yahoo Mail is the poorly-implemented search feature. I’m one of those people that uses their inbox as the main repository of work-related information. Things like article commissions, meeting details and a never-ending stream of press releases are all stored in my email, and rather than tag them or put them into folders (the latter of which I do maybe once a month just to move everything out of my inbox), I rely heavily on the search function to find information that I’m looking for.

The search function in Gmail is excellent. The one in Yahoo Mail – terrible. I’d enter search terms for messages that I knew were in my inbox ‘somewhere’, and Yahoo Mail would find what I was looking for maybe 50% of the time. Even doing a search on a sender’s name wouldn’t produce a complete list of all the email from that person.

Originally I thought it was an indexing issue for new email, and that it would eventually catch up after a day or so. But no – even email that had been in my inbox for months weren’t being found by the search feature, which means that I’ve had to manually hunt down a lot of my email by date. When you get as much email as I do (around 200 a day), that’s a lot of wasted time!

Close behind the search issue on the irritation scale is the incredibly un-intelligent spam blocker. It’s gotten to the point that I have to check the spam folder every time I check my inbox. Perfectly legitimate email with none of the tell-tale spam keywords have landed in that folder, as have email that I’ve actually replied to previously. I’m subscribed to a few mailing lists, and around half of those messages end up in the spam folder, with seemingly no predictable pattern as to which messages are junked or not. To top it off, I’m still getting actual spam in my main inbox.

I miss Gmail. I’ve still got my old Google Apps account under a secondary email address, but now I’m looking at my options for migrating all of my Yahoo Mail to Gmail, plus transfer the domain name, which I bought through Yahoo. The enormity of the task makes me want to hang onto Yahoo Mail for a bit longer. Anyone know if there’s a quick way to do this? All of a sudden getting a virtual assistant to do it all for me looks very appealing.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how you could optimize a Windows Mobile 6 Professional smartphone for web workers.

This week I move onto the iPhone, which, according to research firm Canalys, accounted for 28% of the US smartphone market as of Q4 2007.

Right now, the iPhone is mostly a consumer-oriented cellphone, but that’s set to change in June when the iPhone 2.0 firmware is released. This will likely add business-friendly features like support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Cisco IPsec VPN and remote IT configuration and security capabilities. More importantly, it’s going to give iPhone users the ability to download third-party application through the new Apple-run App Store.

In the run up to the new firmware, there are two ways to add new software to your iPhone: by adding web-based applications that are accessed through the iPhone’s Safari browser; and by “jail-breaking” or unlocking the iPhone to enable installation of third-party software.

If your iPhone isn’t unlocked, the good news is that you can now do it yourself using a single easy-to-use program like ZiPhone – check out the step-by-step tutorial on iClarified for more details.

The bad news is that jail-breaking an iPhone voids the warranty. Apple technicians are able to check if you’ve applied any of the jailbreak hacks and will more than likely refuse to fix your iPhone if you have to send it in for service.

With a jail-broken iPhone, you’re also at the mercy of the hacker community for supplying new firmware releases, as installing a new iPhone firmware version direct from Apple will at best lock it down again, at worst ‘brick’ your iPhone so that it becomes a $499 paperweight (which is what happened to many users with the 1.1 firmware release).

Is the risk worth the reward? Depends on whether you’re happy to give up warranty service in exchange for access to hundreds of free and commercial applications, system tweaks and iPhone themes before the firmware 2.0 release in June.

Here are 10 programs that I’ve handpicked for enhancing the iPhone’s web worker smarts, all of which are accessed through the Installer application that’s automatically added when you jail-break it:

1. Bookmarklets: Add Find, Copy & Paste, Open link in new tab and Flash playback capabilities to the Safari web browser. .
2. DropCopy: Transfer files between Macs and iPhones on the same network.
3. WildEyes: View any PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, TXT and image file through the Safari web browser.
4. Twinkle: Post updates to your Twitter network, see tweets from users that are near you and add images to your tweets.
5. Fring: Chat to friends on MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, and Google Talk, and speak to people over VoIP using the Fring and Skype networks. [You'll need to add the Fring source separately to the Installer app – see here for instructions.]
6. Moleskine: Organize your notes across different labeled folders.
7. Mobile Text Edit: Create simple text documents.
8. Search: Find contacts and and appointments using a simple search form.
9. VoiceNotes: Create simple voice recordings using the iPhone’s built-in mic.
10. iMapIdle: Simulate push email on the iPhone with an IMAP mail server.

The iPhone’s web clipping feature means you can turn any website into a discrete application that you can access through an icon on the home screen. Most popular Web 2.0 sites have created iPhone-optimized portals, many of which simulate full-blown applications like RSS readers, IM clients and time management applications.

Below are 10 of my favorite web apps for the iPhone. Using the ‘Add to Home Screen’ feature in Safari (accessed by tapping on the ‘+’ button at the bottom of the screen), you can add shortcuts to these applications to your iPhone’s home screen.

1. Facebook
2. Google (which combines all Google Mobile services including Gmail, Calendar, Reader and Docs into a single iPhone-optimized interface)
3. Netvibes Mobile
4. Evernote Beta Mobile
5. JiveTalk (multi-platform IM client)
6. iBackpack
7. Glide Write (create and edit Word documents)
8. Box.net
9. Remember the Milk
10. Hahlo (Twitter client)

Other apps useful for web workers include ZoHo Creator Mobile, TiddlyWiki and iBillTo.

I’d like to hear from other web workers with iPhones. How do you rate it as a mobile productivity tool? Have you found any other iPhone applications or web services that are indispensable?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile Q4: All Eyes Were on Android, 4G and the Rising Tablet Tide
• Report: A Mobile Video Market Overview
• In Q3, the Tablet and 4G Were the Big Stories

It may not sound particularly industrious, but with this routine, Ronald Dahl managed to carve out an amazing career for himself as one of the world’s best-selling writers, responsible for well-known books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and (my personal favorite) The BFG.

I’m certainly not advocating working for only two hours a day. But why not, if that’s your daily maximum? Why force yourself to labor away at times that don’t really suit you when, as a web worker, you’ve got the freedom to dictate your own hours?

Getting to know yourself and your own work patterns are key to developing an effective work routine. It took me years to realize that my best hours for writing were between six in the morning and midday. By paying attention to my productivity patterns, I could’ve come to this conclusion a lot sooner and saved myself a lot of time.

You’ve probably already got an idea of whether you’re a morning person or a night owl, and that can be the starting point for figuring out the hours that you work best in. But experiment: you may find that these are the exact opposite to what you thought they’d be. I always mistook myself for a night owl, and it was only after regularly forcing myself to wake up early before 9am deadlines to finalize copy that I realized I was actually writing significantly better in the morning.

It’s amazing how much a simple time change can make. Once I concentrated my writing efforts to my peak productivity period, I was getting through assignments faster than I thought I was capable of. One weekly assignment that used to take me around six hours to do was now taking only a couple of hours. The end result? More work, more money, less stress.

Of course, extraneous factors and pressing deadlines mean it’s not always possible to stick to those times religiously. By having a better understanding of your own limits, however, you can be realistic about how long it takes to get things done during different time periods and adjust your schedule accordingly.

(image courtesy: Flickr user audinou)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

One of the best things about being a web worker is that you don’t have to sit at a desk to be productive. The always-on, always-connected nature of cell phones have revolutionized mobile working, and other portable technology like Blackberrys, thumb drives, laptops and UMPCs have given us the flexibility to work wherever we can get an Internet connection.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be covering the different gadgets you can use to get work done on the road and the software and services for maximizing their effectiveness.

Many functions that are a staple of web working, including email, Web browsing and VoIP, are all accessible on a mobile device, but the best tools for the task aren’t usually installed out of the box.

First cab off the rank is Windows Mobile 6 Professional, a powerful mobile platform that’s made all the more effective with some well-chosen software.

Web browser: Most of us live and breathe through the web browser, so it’s unfortunate that Pocket Internet Explorer in Windows Mobile is so underwhelming. Thankfully there are way to get around its mediocrity. One option is to install a plug-in like SPB Pocket Plus which, among other things, adds tabbed browsing to the mix so you can have multiple browser windows open at a time.

But if you’d rather ditch Pocket Internet Explorer altogether (and I don’t blame you!), you’ve got a few options such as Netfront, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini – the latter of which is my favorite for its speed and flexibility (not to mention the fact that it’s free), although it’ll only work on Windows Mobile if your device has a built-in Java client.

PIM: Windows Mobile devices have native Exchange support out of the box, but what if you use an online PIM like Google Calendar and/or Remember the Milk? Data from both of these services can be synchronized over the air to the PIM applications in Windows Mobile using client-side software. OggSync performs a two-way sync between a Windows Mobile device and Google Calendar, and is available as freeware (which lets you sync one calendar) or a Pro subscription service (which lets you sync multiple calendars in real-time).

Remember the Milk synchronization is offered from the developers directly as a bonus feature for Pro users.  The software is called MilkSync, and it works much the same way as OggSync, with over the air or cradle synchronization to the Tasks application, and you can also specify which lists get synced from the RTM webpage.

VoIP and IM: Skype has a client especially designed for Windows Mobile that works extremely well, but a far better solution is opting for a multi-platform IM and VoIP client like Fring. This is a free client-side application that’s compatible with Skype, Windows Live, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, AIM and Twitter, and it can also be configured to work with SIP services like SIPNET and EuteliaVoIP.

Notes: Finally, if you haven’t managed to give the new beta of Evernote a try yet, perhaps the Windows Mobile client will convince you. Notes taken using the Evernote Mobile application – including photos and text notes – are uploaded to the central Evernote database online, and you can also search through your online notes if you need to access something in your database.

Are there any other Windows Mobile applications that you’ve found indispensable for web working?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era