Content Monetization Manager (Department: Production)

There are an incredible number of ways to monetize content coming onto the horizon. The days of CPM being the only game in town are over. Affiliate links, daily deals, in-text ads, sponsorships, promoted on-site Twitter feeds and remnant inventory optimization: It’s all coming your way if you make money from content. How to best utilize these monetization strategies for your users, your content, your site design and your bottom line is a tricky thing. The content monetization manager will make use of all of the content monetization tools available, the underlying usage analytics, and the CMS, and will constantly A/B test monetization strategies and page layouts to maximize revenue, while preserving the user experience.

Webmaster 2.0 (Department: Marketing)

Pretty much no one has the title of “Webmaster” any more. But like all things retro, it’s coming back. The new webmaster, much like the content monetization manager, will be responsible for fine-tuning every detail of the corporate website to produce the desired result (sales or leads). Websites are becoming much more dynamic, more content-heavy (including text, images and video), and blurring with corporate blogs. Tools of the webmaster 2.0 include Google Analytics, SEO, Salesforce integration (for closed-loop data), and the CMS. The job will include lots of A/B testing of landing pages, cohort analysis and a healthy dose of keyword and inbound linking SEO.

Amplification Manager (Department: Marketing)

As social media evolves and expands, it also becomes more diluted. Many social media vanguards have now pushed Tweeting and Facebooking down to the internship level (partly because it is so time-consuming). What is emerging is a radical new philosophy of amplification: the ability to use social media, SEO, virality, and sharing as a powerful mechanism for promotion. While most social media managers would sum up the first five years of social media as “engagement,” the next five will be about “amplifying.” Like having sharing buttons in all the right places, cross-posting, SEO, targeted retweets and Klout scores (amplification being a big part of this score). If you’re not amplifying, you’re dying.

Game Mechanics Designer (Department: Engineering/Product Management)

Just like almost every website has a sharing feature, every application in the next few years will have game mechanics. Easy to understand, but harder than you think to design, game mechanics will become a full-fledged job. Just like any application development company worth its salt has a studied and knowledgeable UX person on the team, the game mechanics designer role will become just as important and prevalent.

Employee Mechanics Designer (Department: HR)

The future of the employee experience will be much like Foursquare. You’re in sales and made 50 phone calls in a day? Great, you just got the “Heavy Dialer” badge. You’re in QA? Well how many bugs did you close out today? Check the company QA leaderboard. It’s all coming; Marc Benioff is already talking about integrating these kind of features into Salesforce.com.

Much like the game mechanics designer designs the incentive and engagement structure in your application, the employee mechanics designer will design the internal game that is your business, which will include an ever-evolving set of rules that must be aligned with the current goals of the company.

Metrics Manager (Department: Finance)

The metric manager’s job is to extract data from every nook and cranny of the company. Once the stream of data is flowing, it’s then time to put it in a data warehouse and do interesting things with it. Pretty charts and pictures usually are the most engaging place to start, but departmental dashboards and daily metrics emails will be more useful. Metrics managers will love statistics and Tufte.

Crowd Manager (Department: Crowd and Community – A New Department)

In the next 10 years, every company will leverage the crowd in some shape or form. Whether it’s directly through building applications in Mechanical Turk or sponsoring designs in 99Designs, or indirectly by managing a sub-crowd in a marketplaces like Trada (for advertising) or Napkin Labs (for design). How you interface with the crowd, how you incentivize them (payment, praise, virtual currency, rewards), and, more importantly, how you teach your own company to work with them correctly is key.

In case you don’t want to work for anyone (how very Gen-Y of you) — there are also some amazing self-employment opportunities arising as well:

Crowd Worker (Self-Employed)

Having a boss is so 2010. The next generation of workers will be gainfully self-employed working in the crowd whenever and wherever they want. As crowdsourcing marketplaces (such as Trada’s performance-based advertising marketplace) reach critical mass and generate real dollars for their workers, full-time livings are being made by a few. Soon the few shall be the masses. 2011 will be the year that crowdsourcing as a viable business and a viable job becomes a reality.

Expect the increase in the self-service workforce to drive the need for new regulation (and opportunity) around individual and group-buying healthcare. It would also be a good time to invest in Starbucks, the primary office-space of the crowd-crowd.

Life Coach 2.0 (Self-Employed)

It used to be the good old days where you could just pack your old self in a box, move to another town, and start over. Unfortunately, with everything in the cloud, your former self is destined to keep following you. What you need is some expertise.

The new life coach will be versed in online reputation building and PR. They’ll know about services like About.me before you do. They’ll be monitoring your Klout scores and crowd reputation. Breach some etiquette on Twitter or make some public faux pas – no problem – your life coach can just SEO that away for you in a few weeks.

As the future become about reputation, engagement and online social profile, we’ll all need a little help smoothing out the edges. Life coaches will need to know about building reputation, scoring algorithms, and how to be a better you (at least statistically speaking).

Personal Trainer 2.0 (Self-Employed)

The future of the self is measurement. How many footsteps did I take today (FitBit)? How many calls at work did I make (employee game mechanics)? How did my Klout score go up or down? Am I meeting my workout goals on DailyMile?  The old personal trainer/nutritionist role will morph into a digital age version of itself, focused on measuring first, optimizing second. Skills will include technology (measurement), data management (storage), analysis, and medical and privacy law.

Niel Robertson is a three-time entrepreneur and CEO of Trada Paid Search, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace. You can find Niel on Twitter at @nielr1.

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According to a report from oDesk, employers in December continued a previous trend of looking to hire mobile developers, especially those skilled in developing iOS applications. The “Mobile Apps” category has jumped from 19th place to 10th over the last year. This underscores predictions made in Simon’s recent article for GigaOM Pro, “Top Remote Work Trends to Watch for in 2011″ (sub. req.), and Aliza’s discussion of the ubiquity of mobile platforms.

The three most frequently-posted job categories (unchanged from the previous year) are web programming, web design and blog/article writing. In addition, the SEO, data entry, and graphic design categories continue to be popular.

The report also showed a very large (319 percent) increase in postings for translation jobs, and for those with expertise in such languages as Spanish, German and Korean. Technical skills used in web development, such as PHP, HTML, CSS, WordPress, Photoshop, SEO, MySQL, and JavaScript, hold most of the top ten ranked skills requested. The top ten skills list also includes English and writing.

The “Online Employment Report” also found that job postings for business planning and market strategy professionals more than doubled from 2009, with a 123 percent increase in hiring.

The report shows that the three top countries of origin for contractors employed through oDesk are India, the Philippines and the U.S., followed by other central European and Asian countries, and Canada.

The report concludes that “Online work is creating an economy of opportunity — where work is not linked to location, but to skills, experience and abilities. This shift towards a flexible, on-demand workforce is becoming an established hiring model for companies of all sizes to get more done with less, scale to meet demand, and increase efficiency. For employees and contractors, this allows them to manage their own work-life balance, get paid based on merit, and access an entire world of work opportunities.”

Which of your skills are employers most interested in today?

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Last year, the New York Times published an article (login required) citing research finding that about 80 percent of people who make New Year’s resolutions break them by Valentine’s Day. A study from 2007 supports this, saying only twelve percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals.

Perhaps this means that before we list our goals for 2011, we should take a closer look at our own attitudes towards goal-setting. What misconceptions do we have, and what can we do to remedy them?

Myth #1: Tell everyone your goals so that you’re publicly accountable.

In theory, publicizing your goals with friends, or on your blog or Facebook profile, might force you to achieve them, so as not to be seen as someone who’s all talk and no action. But according to a 2009 study by goal-setting researcher Peter Gollwitzer (PDF), this isn’t always true. Most people state their behavioral goals in very general terms (“My goal is to eat healthier”) that gives the premature impression we’ve already done them.

Here’s what works instead: implementation intentions. Gollwitzer defines them (PDF) as a plan spelling out when, where, and how you intend to accomplish a goal. In fact, another study (PDF) shows that implementation intentions work so well that they can help you accomplish your goals despite the presence of distracting thoughts and emotions.

This doesn’t mean it’s easy after you establish a plan. You’ll need to check and update your plan often. It’s also important to start working on your goal as soon as possible. The more time your goal remains inactive after you’ve stated your intentions, the less likely you are to accomplish it.

Myth #2: Reward yourself for your progress.

Some people suggest that to keep yourself focused and motivated in your pursuit of a goal, you need to have rewards for accomplishments. For example, if you successfully stick to your schedule for a week, you’ll give yourself the license to go out with friends during the weekend. While there’s nothing wrong with rewards per se, you need to be careful about how you think of them.

Research shows that for large goals (e.g.. becoming healthier) that have many supporting subgoals (e.g.. sticking to a diet, exercising regularly), whenever you successfully achieve a subgoal, you should reward your personal commitment to the larger goal rather than to  your progress. Rewarding yourself for achieving one subgoal may lead you to ignore the other subgoals, because you’ll view them as substitutes. If you reward your commitment to the larger goal, the subgoals will seem interrelated, and you’ll be more driven to pursue each of them.

Myth #3: Focus on yearly goals.

By definition, New Year’s resolutions are goals that must be achieved within a year. While this tradition can work for some goals, it may not be effective to use such a long time-frame. First, even if we think we know ourselves well, we tend to be poor predictors of what we’ll need or feel in the future. Our perspectives, situations, and desires may differ greatly within a year. Second, most research (PDF) backs up the idea that setting short-term goals is more effective than looking at the big picture. This means that even if you have a list of yearly goals, it’s better to break them down into smaller monthly or weekly subgoals.

Given these goal-setting myths, we should be more attentive to how we set our goals, what works in practice, and what only seems effective in theory. By looking at our goal-setting behavior together with the goals themselves, we’ll be more likely to accomplish more this year.

Do you set goals during the New Year? Which tactics improve your success rate?

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It can be too easy to slip into the daily routine of work and the rest of your life without thinking about what you love to do. The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on what you really want to be doing.

Here are a few suggestions for finding ways to do what you love, and still pay the bills.

Reflect

Before you do anything else, consider what you are passionate about. Think back over the past few months.

• Which projects were you excited to be working on? These are the projects you wanted to work on late into the night — not because you needed to meet a deadline, but because they were so much fun and interesting that you couldn’t put them down.
• Which projects left you feeling energized and excited?
• What was it about the projects that you loved? Were you excited about the data, the technology, the writing, the analysis or some other aspect?

Once you figure out what you love, the next step is to decide how to do more such projects, and reduce the amount time you spend on work that leaves you exhausted and drained.

Rework the Current Gig

If you already have a great job, but spend too much time on work that isn’t interesting, you can often redefine your job over time to end up with a job that you are passionate about. Volunteer to take on a special project that really interests you, and see if you can make it into a full-time job. I work with someone who loves organizing events. She arranged several events as side projects, and when the team grew, she was able to convince management to make events her full-time job.

You can also look for new opportunities within your company, and change jobs to do something more interesting. If you think there’s a need for a role that doesn’t exist, build a case for it based on real data. Convince management that someone needs to fill this role, and that you are the perfect person to fill it.

Have Side Projects

Side projects can be tricky to balance. On the one hand, they can give you something fun to work on that you can control. But too many of them can leave you drained, and steal your focus from other important work or relationships. For me, the best side projects are ones where I don’t care if I make money. If I need the money, such projects become more like work and less like play.

I tend to launch random, fun websites where I can practice my skills while creating something a few friends will enjoy. Over the holidays, I started working on a vegan cookbook. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I know it’s the right project because I have been working on it constantly over the past few days and looking forward to the work. Eventually, I’ll get to build another website for the book.

Make the Leap

If you’re really unhappy in your current job or freelance situation, take advantage of an economy that is starting to rebound. Now is a good time to:

• Build new skills,
• Start working on different types of projects,
• Look for another job, or
• Make the shift to consulting or freelancing.

Take a fresh look at what you really love to do, and consider all the options.

What projects ignite your passion? Share how you have been able to find work that keeps you excited and energized.

Photo by Flickr user Marcy Kellar used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Certainly, some of us make half-hearted attempts to accomplish a few of our life and business goals. But how many people do you know who put everything on the line to pursue their deepest, most life-changing dreams? What are the rest of us doing, and what are we waiting for?

Choices and Challenges

Of course, circumstances get in the way. There are challenges, setbacks and detours. But each of us has a choice. Although it won’t be easy to navigate back to the right path, if we say that we can’t find our way around obstacles, we’re making a choice to leave things as they are.

Last night, I was reading about Roald Dahl, author of such hopeful and imaginative books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That might be my absolute favorite story about an underdog who overcomes obstacles while continuing to believe in something, even when all is stacked against him.

It turns out Roald Dahl was a lot like his character Charlie. Dahl’s personal life was filled with hardship and tragedy. In spite of all the challenges he faced, he remained positive and achieved great things. As it says on his website, “The series of misfortunes and tragedies Dahl… suffer[ed did not] made him more bitter. Loss and physical adversity seemed to stimulate his enormous energies to positive action. He fought misfortune as if it was a dragon to be slain.”

Time to Dream Big

I hope that 2011 will be a year of great progress toward achieving our deeply-buried dreams, and a year of doing things that require us to step out of our comfort zones and test our abilities, even if they lead to failure or, even more frightening, success.

I challenge you, as we round out these last few days of 2010: dust off those gutsy dreams and ambitions you’ve kept to yourself until now. Dare to put yourself out there; do something big this coming year. It doesn’t need to look big to anyone else, but you’ll know it is, because it will require you to go out on a limb and do things in an entirely different way.

For 2011, live the way you truly want to live, and achieve what you’ve only ever dreamed you could achieve.

What big, audacious goals do you have for 2011?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Neal

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I keep meeting web workers who, citing personal preference, fatigue, or lack of time, fail to bother with certain new concepts, sites, or services. I’ve met web workers this year who thought Twitter was a waste of time, electronic newsletters were dead and blogging was for teenagers.

There’s probably a little of the nay-sayer in all of us — we all have personal preferences that lead us toward certain aspects of the web. But these choices can limit our ability to participate in the world in which we earn our livings.

I’m a case in point: in my work, I deal with copyright issues every day, and I believe strongly in the concept of copyright. So I’ve never been to a torrent site, and I’ve never downloaded ripped content (besides unwittingly viewing illegally copied images or text on offending websites). I doubt that I really understand the nature or extent of the ripped content that’s available online, or how easily and prolifically it’s shared, replicated and accessed illegally.

That’s not an isolated example. I have a contact in human resources who doesn’t use LinkedIn. I have a friend who works in community-brand building, but hasn’t got a Facebook account. I’ve worked with content producers who don’t know what social bookmarking is.

What Are You Missing?

I’m sure you can think of similarly gob-smacking examples of self-inflicted ignorance. Why do we do it to ourselves? And what’s it doing to us?

The answer to the first question isn’t difficult to find: information overload and time limitations have honed our abilities to swiftly sift and prioritize the information we access, and to focus on that which we believe will help us achieve our goals. In my case, since I’m only looking for access to legal content that doesn’t infringe copyright, I haven’t had a need to access illegal download sites.

While it’s fair to say that if we didn’t prioritize what we see, and focus on what we needed, we’d be doomed to a tedious eternity spent “surfing the ‘net” (remember that?!), the limitations of applying a needs-basis filter to the information and services we investigate are considerable.

By unconsciously relying on our own preferences, morals, or off-the-cuff perceptions to direct the way we interact online, we restrict our knowledge — and our ability to gain more. In the long term, we may also reduce our employment prospects, our ability to work with others, and our potential to move into the fields that interest us.

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Everyone has inevitable gaps in their knowledge, and I’m not advocating swamping ourselves in a tsunami of media consumption.

But what if we slightly altered our philosophy toward the way we filter information — one that was conscious of our personal preferences, and actively worked to assess their helpfulness on a case-by-case basis?

I’m not about to start torrenting Hollywood’s entire 2010 output, and perhaps you’re determined never to join a social networking site, or even the thought of using an RSS feed kicks your nervous twitch into overdrive. Maybe there are some preferences or morals that we’re perfectly happy to describe as our “limits.”

That’s fine — as long as we make that choice consciously. But should we let our unconscious preferences restrict our understanding of what’s happening in our chosen fields? Should they stop us from gaining  experience or building our expertise?

I don’t think so. I have the feeling that the more I look at my areas of specialization, the more places I’ll find that these preferences have curtailed my understandings and perceptions.

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Web workers don’t need to actively seek jobs to find them. These days, the jobs find their way to us. Job ads are part of the information overload that plagues web workers.

Once upon a time, we had to scour newspapers for jobs. Then we began to rely on friends and web working contacts to let us know about cool opportunities. But now even the most steadfast web company employees are being bombarded daily (or weekly, or monthly) with job offers.

It’s not just social media that’s the culprit — although personal recommendations of some job opportunities via social media certainly adds to their appeal. Web workers routinely have job searches set up on job networks; we have LinkedIn profiles and blogs. We’re constantly receiving tweets, emails, IM and calls from companies that are interested in our skills.

If information technology jobs are to the 2010s what factory jobs were to the Industrial Revolution, then web company owners have some serious competition to consider. Web workers can secure work in any industry, with employers of any size.

Sure, your hip little web outfit might have pool tables, a bring-your-pet-to-work day, and a flexible start time, but unless your company can also compete on the basics — pay rates, expectation of working hours, staff development, company culture — it’ll likely lose staff to the ebbs and flows of the job information that’s coming our way every day.

Here are the five benefits the web workers I know want in their next job (and feel they’re not getting now).

Stability

Even here in Australia, where the GFC had mercifully little impact on the local job market, the web workers I know are tired of restructures, layoffs and retrenchments. For those in other countries, the frustration must be considerable.

But stability also implies predictability: Can we expect our projects to run on time? How often are we fighting fires as a result of inadequate processes? How frequently are we called on to work unpaid overtime at the last minute? Perhaps it’s just me, but web companies seem often to have higher expectations of what their staff will do for them — and be able to achieve — at short notice than organizations in other industries.

Career Plans

Pool tables and iPhones do not a career plan make. While perks are cool, many web workers would like to have some idea of where they’re headed, career-wise. If they can’t see a career progression through your organization, they may well begin to listen to the job-seeking hubbub in their social networks, be they online or off.

The swift growth of web companies means that often, human resources essentials like periodic performance reviews, career goal-setting, and so on, can be neglected, leaving web workers with little idea of where they might be headed with their current employer — or whether that employer even cares.

Remuneration

Those job sites have a knack of sending web workers ads for well-paid jobs. If your web business can’t afford to keep up with market rates — or better them — you may well have trouble attracting or retaining good staff.

Contracting, too, is a growing field where web workers can often earn better rates than they would as a permanent staff member — and it delivers that other great benefit: flexibility.

Flexibility

The numbers of people who wish to work remotely, part time, or with more flexible hours is growing; several of my contacts have left employers who wouldn’t compromise on the full-time, on-site work philosophy. And why not? Lifestyle matters, and in a competitive market, employers who don’t offer flexibility lose out.

Trust

Linked to flexibility is trust: many of the constraints that we face in the workplace reveal that our employers simply do not trust us. Blocking access to certain websites, refusing to consider a policy of remote work, unrealistic non-compete clauses in employment contracts: all of these are common in the web work environment, and are clear signs of the kind of mistrust that poisons company culture.

If you’re interested in learning more about the needs of remote workers, and how to build and manage a successful virtual workforce, it’s something we’ll be covering in depth at our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco on December 9.

These points sound elementary. So why are so many of them lacking in web jobs? What do you seek when you look for work on the web?

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ambition, n.: an earnest desire for some type of achievement and the willingness to strive for its attainment

Thinking about ambition reminds me of Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford. The words “stay hungry” have followed me ever since reading his address in a magazine soon after it took place.

It also reminds me of my first years in business and of my first venture that was a real success: my web design business, which has since taken a back seat to other ventures, but still has the power to motivate me when I think of it.

In the first full twelve months of starting the business, I had earned what was for me at the time quite a bit of money, but I didn’t really pay attention to that fact in the beginning. I just did the work. Now, though, I can appreciate that accomplishment and how I achieved it by myself, and for me, that’s what ambition is all about.

Take away spouses and parents, mentors, physical possessions. Take away everything, and you’re left with yourself; knowing that, no matter what, you can create something from nothing, and you can survive. Knowing that makes you think anything is possible.

It’s not about being on your own or not having anyone to help you, quite the opposite. The greater that inner source of power, the more you have to offer those around you and the more you appreciate the true strength that can result from coming together around a shared passion.

However, it is important to know that we can build something with our own hands, that we have that ability within us. When challenges find us, and they will, we need to know that we are resourceful and that, as before, we will find a way through them or around them, whichever comes first.

That’s so very powerful, but wanting something and being willing to do whatever it takes to get it are two very different things, and lately, I’m coming to appreciate how you need both the wanting and the willingness in order to achieve.

I’m starting to apply that distinction to my own decision-making when it comes to where I spend my energy. I’m coming to accept that if I don’t want something bad enough, I’m never going to do the work it will take to reach it. My time and energy would be better spent on something I actually want to achieve and for which I’m willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish: those things that make me want to get up early and stay up late, where sleep becomes unnecessary and something I have to force myself to do, because I simply can’t wait to do whatever is next on the list to move the vision forward. It truly is a hunger.

Over the last year, I’ve found it especially difficult to build a team of people who take pride in their work and are ambitious when it comes to their own success or sense of accomplishment. I’m not sure what the ultimate solution to that problem will be, but when I think about adding someone to my team, I know that it’s important for that person to have dreams and goals of his or her own.

I’m OK with the fact that he or she might see my business as a stepping stone, a means to an end, because that means that while that person is with me, he or she will be striving, reaching for something. He or she will be ambitious, and I need, we all need, people like that around us in order to make each of our dreams a reality.

Do you let ambition drive your business and the decisions you make around it?

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Advantages of Corporate Web Working

• Regular paycheck. It is really nice to know exactly how much you are going to make and have it just magically appear without having to send invoices or nag to get it.
• Taxes. These also magically come out of your paycheck with less hassle and no dealing with quarterly payments and more complicated taxes.
• Insurance and retirement. Both of these are considerably easier and often better than what you would have as an independent worker when you look at things like company match in a 401k and the quality of many corporate insurance programs.
• Less paperwork. Unless you happen to be a corporate accountant, corporate web workers can often avoid the piles of paperwork that are associated with running your own business.
• Paid vacation. I like being forced to take a couple of weeks off a year and still get paid for it.

Advantages of Being an Independent Web Worker

• Flexibility. When you are your own boss, you can be as flexible with your time as you want without worrying about your boss thinking you are a slacker.
• Choice of projects. As an independent worker, you can pick and choose the projects that you want to work on (or not), and you can choose to work on something slightly outside of your normal work, either just for fun or to expand your skillset.
• Tax advantages. Depending on how you organize your business and expenses, you can end up paying less in taxes because of all of the things you can write off as part of your business.
• Balance. It can be easier to balance your work with other parts of your life when you have complete control and flexibility over your schedule.

Although I have listed five advantages for corporate web working and only four for independent web working, it’s not a question of numbers. The real question that you need to ask yourself is which of these advantages are most important for you and your current situation. In other words, you need to think about what you want, your expectations and your working style to decide what it right for you at this point in time. Here are a few questions that you might want to ask yourself:

• Do I really want to own my own business? Is the increased flexibility worth all of the extra paperwork, or would I prefer to work in a more traditional corporate job?
• Am I self-motivated and will I push myself hard enough to be successful on my own or do I rely on having a manager provide me with work and feedback?
• Are my skills and talents better suited to freelancing or a corporate environment?
• Can I market my skills to make the change to the corporate world or to become a freelancer?
• How do I want to spend my time?
• What do I enjoy doing and which path would allow me to more fully enjoy my work?
• How well do I handle different types of stress? Keep in mind that financial, personal, project and other stresses may have a greater or lesser impact on you.
• Are you comfortable with uncertainty, particularly financial uncertainty, or do you prefer to have stability?

For me, the decision to become a freelancer was the right one at the time. I had never been a freelancer and wanted the experience of having my own business. After the excitement wore off and the burnout from the long hours started to set in, I decided that going back to the corporate world was the right decision for me at this point in my life. I was lucky enough to maintain some of the flexibility to work from home most days while still having the advantages of a corporate job.

Have you moved from freelance to corporate web work or vice versa? What were the factors that persuaded you to make the move?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Enabling the Web Work Revolution

Cubicle photo by Mark Sebastian used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, and bird photo by Flickr user Yogendra Yoshi used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Independent professionals (Solvate calls them “Talent”) can register with Solvate and create a profile for the Talent Engine by selecting the specific professional services they have for sale. Talent are required to note which companies and brands they have performed those services for in the past, which makes it possible for businesses to identify the most qualified Talent for their project. Businesses can filter profiles in the Talent Engine according to specific criteria including service, company, brand, industry, specialty and skill.

Before building a profile, all Talent must complete a recruiting and vetting process that includes evaluating a candidate’s public recommendations, samples of work or portfolio and references. This vetting process is designed to ensure that Solvate’s customers receive a professional experience and high quality results.

Small businesses and looking for resources can browse available Talent, and sign up for a Solvate account here. Members get a dedicated Account Manager to help manage their projects.

U.S.-based independent professionals looking to market their skills through Solvate can begin the vetting processes by applying online.

I’m interested to hear from both professionals who have registered with Solvate and businesses that have found professional using the service. Let us know what you think of Solvate in the comments.

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“What makes the difference between wishing and realizing our wishes? Lots of things, of course, but the main one, I think, is whether we link our wishes to our active work. It may take months or years, but it’s far more likely to happen when we care so much that we’ll work as hard as we can to make it happen.” – Mister Rogers

Getting from Point A to Point B

We may have big ideas and hopes for our businesses, but getting from Point A to Point B is often where we run into trouble. Success, though, comes when we can connect our goals for our businesses to where we are today (and every day) through consistent action, but how can we ensure consistency each and every day?

We have to care about the work we’re doing — really care. If we love our work, we’ll be a lot more willing to stay the course and work as hard as we can (for as long as it takes) to see our vision to reality, and, in fact, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Loving the Work (to the Extreme)

I’m sure you’ve heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s the author of “Crush It!” and the face of Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine, which took his family’s business from $4 million to $60 million annually in just a few short years.

I’ve read many times that Gary Vaynerchuk is a workaholic (he might even be a self-proclaimed workaholic). I’ve heard that he works 18-hour days, but no matter what you think about working that much, the real question is, do you love what you do so much that you are willing to put in that kind of time and effort?

From what I’ve seen of Gary Vaynerchuk, he’s one of the most passionate and enthusiastic people one could meet. Personally, I don’t know a lot of people who are all that passionate or enthusiastic about very much of anything (and they generally work far less than 18 hours a day).

Certainly, Gary takes his work to the extreme, but maybe that’s part of the reason he has been so successful. I don’t think very many people ever take anything to an extreme, opting instead to live in the middle and ending up bored to death with it. Passion and enthusiasm, though, can make you want to take your work to the extreme.

Finding Passion

Many of us are not so lucky as to know from an early age what it is that we want to do, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find passion just the same, and by finding passion and enthusiasm, we’ll be much more engaged in our work, which will lead to greater contentment and success in our business endeavors (whatever they may be).

So, how do you find passion when your calling is not so obvious?

• Find a way to serve. Many times (and at probably the most rewarding times), passion comes from helping others. Teaching, sharing and offering support to someone else can bring enthusiasm for finding more and greater ways to be of service.
• Do what you enjoy. If you love writing, there’s a way to leverage that to help you build a thriving business. The same is true for speaking, entertaining, or meeting people. You can integrate any of these talents and strengths into a tool for building almost any kind of business. You can also leverage things like your love of sports or home-making or technology.
• Follow your curiosity. Gary Vaynerchuk was curious about wine, so he started exploring that interest and then decided to share his findings with an audience who wanted down-to-earth advice on the topic. If you’re curious about something, leverage that curiosity and see if there might be an audience who is also interested in learning about it.

Finding work that you truly love to do is key to being able to stick with it and put in the time and effort necessary to build a thriving business. If you can find something that ignites passion and enthusiasm within you, you’re much more likely to find true and lasting success.

No matter what your business, how do you make sure you remain excited to show up and build your business day after day?

Photo by Flickr user laszlo-photo, licensed under CC 2.0

A post from Chris Brogan stirred my entrepreneurial spirit. In it, he discussed how the phrase “looking for work” used to mean mean looking for (and creating) opportunities to work, rather than just looking for a job. He laments that, “We’ve somehow decided that ‘security’ equals working for someone else who has all the cards and pulls all the strings.”

Brogan goes on to describe how people can create their own work by being entrepreneurial. Certainly, that applies to creating opportunities where others might say they don’t exist (starting a new business, for example), but it also applies to how you look at your business right now.

For the guy running the screenprinting shop, don’t just make t-shirts; create opportunities to make t-shirts. For the lady running the bakery, don’t just make cupcakes; create opportunities for people to want cupcakes.

For each of us, we have something we want to make, do or sell, but we can’t just do the work; we have to actually create the opportunities for doing the work.

So, how does this work in practice? Let’s take the cupcake lady. Business is slow. People aren’t buying cupcakes. She needs to find a way to make people want to buy cupcakes. How can she do that? A trendy idea I like is people substituting cupcakes for their actual wedding cake, so why couldn’t she position herself as the local baker for the job? She could find and create unique wedding cupcake displays and showcase them in her bakery window or in posters around her shop. Certainly, in big cities or in trendier locations, this might be something seen at every bakery, but what if she’s the first in her area to offer it? Cupcake gold, at least for a while, and then she’ll have to create a new reason for people to want cupcakes.

So, how can you implement this for your business? You just need to think outside the box.

Think about your product or service. How do people use it now, and is there a way that you can get them to want to use it more? No matter what your business, your customers and clients all want the same thing, whether that’s more time, more money, less aggravation and annoyance, or a greater sense of security, well-being, acceptance, or achievement. How can you help them get one or more of those things?

No matter what you do, no matter what product you create or service you provide, you can find ways to create demand around your business. All it takes is a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit and a good dose of creativity.

How can you “find a place to apply what you know how to do”? How can you “create work” for yourself instead of waiting for it to come to you?

Photo by Flickr user shimelle, licensed under CC 2.0

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A Story About Change

My friend Betsy Talbot and her husband Warren are forging their own path and making their own way. Two years ago, they decided that they wanted to travel the world. Life was too short, they decided, to wait for that dream life to magically create itself. They had to figure out a way to make things happen — their own way, right now. They created a plan for saving money and paring down to make room for an around-the-world trip of one to two years, and one month from now on October 1, just over two years from originally setting out their intentions, they will be embarking on an adventure of a lifetime.

What’s Their Secret?

Betsy and Warren’s story is very inspiring, but unfortunately, the most probable initial reaction as an outsider is to think, “I could never do something like that. I have [x, y, z] obligations, and anyway, even if I wanted to do it, I wouldn’t know where to start.” The thing is, I have known Betsy for many years now, and she’s just like a lot of other people I know, myself included, and yet, somehow she and Warren have made this happen, so what’s their secret?

One thing that struck me that Betsy said recently was, “I’m becoming more comfortable with the unknown.” I don’t think it occurred to her that she and Warren had become comfortable with the unknown quite some time ago.

I’ve watched them carry out their plan over the past couple of years, and at almost every step of that journey, they were not exactly sure what to do or how things would go, and yet, they kept going and remained confident that they would figure things out along the way, and that’s exactly what they did.

When You Don’t Have the Answers

As business owners, we have to get used to not having all the answers, knowing that if the answers were easily found, anyone and everyone could attempt to start a business, and they would all succeed at it.

I think our first instinct, anytime we don’t have the answers or when things don’t seem to be moving along as smoothly as we might have expected, is to think, “I must be doing something wrong,” when in all likelihood, it’s just that what we’re doing has never been done before in quite the same way, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Instead of immediately thinking we should change course and do things the way someone else has done them, perhaps we might step back and ask ourselves, “Is there really one answer, one right way to do this? Has this even been done before, or do I simply need to become comfortable with creating my own way?”

Working in Spite of Not Knowing

Perhaps the biggest part of it is learning to stay the course, even when the course doesn’t yet exist. There’s no path laid out ahead of you, and you’re learning to navigate as you go. Learn to keep going, in spite of not having clear directions. Create a plan you believe is most likely to succeed by studying the cues of those who have succeeded before you, but accept that you are forging a new path in many ways, so the answers may not always be immediately available.

How have you learned to become comfortable with the unknown?

Photo by Flickr user VinothChandar, licensed under CC 2.0

Although I work “remotely”, I do value meeting with my clients in person — so much, in fact, that I make regular time to see each of my contacts. The frequency of that contact usually depends on how important the client is to me, and how much I want their business, but in all cases, I find the face-to-face time really valuable.

Working full-time would mean that I wouldn’t be able to maintain my regular contact schedule. I wouldn’t have a lot of time to be in touch with them electronically, either. And, as a freelancer, my fear was that once I was out of sight, I’d be out of mind. Two months is a lifetime to some of my clients, and I didn’t want to get to the end of my contract and discover that I’d lost half my clients.

Taking a Relationship Break

Employed teams working in disparate locations have it easier than the freelancer. For one thing, you’re paid for the time you spend building relationships, and your employer requires you to work together. So whether you like it or not, you know you’re likely to have contact with your remote colleagues.

The remote freelancer is faced with a different dilemma. Time is money, so relationship-building and maintenance needs to be efficient as well as effective. If your primary means of client contact is, say, video calling, and you have a client who doesn’t want to do that, it matters — you either have to choose some other method of contact, or risk losing the client.

Finding a solution that meets everyone’s needs is important, and fortunately it’s usually not too difficult. My strategy involves using social networks and making sure I stay on top of ongoing work discussions via email, but my after those methods, my preferred approach was face-to-face meetings. And that method had been successful for my clients and I … until I landed a full-time contract.

Making it Work

How do remote freelancers handle these kinds of relationship breaks? While I didn’t want to lose contact with my clients, I didn’t really want them loading me up with work while I had a full-time gig, either. It’s a tricky balance, but it’s not impossible. As most freelancers know, all too often promised work falls through and deadlines are pushed out — we have no choice but to manage our workloads, and our clients’ expectations, accordingly.

The approaches I took to managing the break between myself and my clients varied, but it did have some basic, common features. First up, I made sure I had all my clients’ phone and email details handy, and knew where each client’s projects were at.

I then discussed the fact that I would be working on a two-month contract with each client in turn. This gave both myself and my clients the opportunity to explain our expectations for that period — which tasks would be completed, what progress we wanted to see, and so on — so that we were on the same page when my contract job began. This proved very handy in the ensuing weeks, as we communicated via email, SMS and the occasional phone call about the progress of various jobs.

The other thing I did was made sure I was in contact with my clients through the social networks they prefer. Some of them don’t bother with social networking at all, but some do, and I wanted to remain top of mind for these guys.

Since I don’t have my own blog or site to which clients can subscribe, social networks are a good way for me to stay in the minds of my clients, and promote my skills to them. By connecting with them all on their preferred networks, and making sure I updated my status on those networks whenever I had information that might be of interest to them, I could help reduce the sense that I was unavailable to them — even though, for most of each day, I basically was.

As the weeks drew on, I kept a reasonably tight-laced task list, which included notes about contacting clients and following up on prior discussions we’d had. So the kinds of contacts I’d usually complete as a matter of course became work tasks — to-do items — in themselves. By treating these contacts a little more systematically than I might otherwise, I was able to keep track of what I was doing and avoid the sorts of brain misfires that can happen when you’re working nights as well as days.

This is how I handled a necessary break in my remote client relationships — and survived to tell the tale! What tools and techniques do you use to keep yourself on clients’ minds, even when you’re out of sight?

Image by stock.xchng user pixelstar.

For example, five years ago, I wanted to help those affected by the floods caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, since I have some connections with New Orleans. In my pre-web career, I worked in radio, and was privileged to manage community radio station WWOZ for a short time over twenty years ago. Although I only lived in New Orleans for a few months, I fell in love with the city’s unique music and culture.

So in the aftermath of the storms, I contacted WWOZ’s webmaster, who had evacuated to another city, and asked what I could do to help. At his request, I put together a temporary website that allowed station staff, musicians, and the community to share messages from wherever they were. This was in the days before Facebook, Twitter and the like.

I also developed a similar website, which is no longer active, to foster community communication during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. And I’ve developed websites for political candidates and causes I believe in.

Of course, professionals need to set limits. My three-person company generally produces one pro bono website per year. Once we agree to take on such a project, we go through the same process we use to specify a scope of work for paid projects. It’s imperative to make sure that clients understand that there’s only so much uncompensated work we can do.

Unfortunately, the tax deductibility of in-kind donations is limited; check with your accountant for details. Nevertheless, my colleagues agree that donating our skills and time is an important part of what we do.

How have you used your professional skills to assist your community?

Photo courtesy NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) Collection

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The fun part of being a community manager is that every day is different, and you never quite know what to expect. Sometimes, I’ll have a pretty nice plan for how I want to spend my day, but then something in the community jumps out and has to be taken care of instead of following my original plan. This constant uncertainty is what makes it such a fun job — assuming you like flying by the seat of your pants, which I do. The difficult part about describing what community managers do every day is that the job is completely different depending on the type of community that you manage. I manage an open-source developer community, so it’s worth bearing in mind that my day might be very different from someone who manages a community of fitness enthusiasts, say. Let’s get started with a look into my life.

6:00am: I get up, put on the kettle to make some tea, and jump right into email. We have a large group of community members in Europe, so my day starts really early to take advantage of a little overlapping time to respond to critical items before they leave work. I start with all of the mailing list email, because I’ve gotten pretty good at processing this kind of email even before that first cup of tea. I try to avoid responding before I am fully caffeinated, but I can at least sort through it all and archive the things that don’t require anything from me. At this point, I move on to other email and see if there is anything urgent. Now, if I wake up to a big pile of spam or a gigantic flame war somewhere in the community, all bets are off because I’ll need to deal with that first.
7:00am: This is usually when I try to step back, assess the situation and start to plan how I really need to spend my time over the course of the day. I’ll take a look at my task list and juggle my tasks around to figure out what I need to do during the day and make sure that the tasks are appropriately prioritized. At this point, I’ll usually start poking around on IRC to see if there are any interesting discussions or questions, and I start answering those emails that I sat aside earlier.
9:00am: Around this time, I often check into other areas of the community and browse my community-related feeds and related communication: New blog posts, recent changes from the wiki, Twitter, etc. I’ll usually spend some time here responding to people, reading wiki pages and cleaning up wiki edits, and more responding to email.
11:00am: This is my break time. After working 5 hours straight, I’m usually ready for a break, so this is when I try to go for a run or work out, shower and eat lunch. Depending on the day, lunch is often consumed over the keyboard while I catch up on anything that came in during my run.
1:00pm: You probably noticed that most of my morning was spent in reactive, tactical, process-related activities. Things in my community start to quiet down considerably when all of the Europeans are asleep, so this is when I do all of my work that requires thinking, focus and strategy. I’ll often ignore email for big chunks of time in the afternoon while I focus on getting real work done. Today, for example, I spent all afternoon planning a way to overhaul some of our community communication processes and documenting these ideas so that while I’m asleep tonight, my friends in Europe can provide me with some feedback. During this big chunk of focused time, I often work on writing tasks (blog posts, community documents, etc.), metrics, strategy and planning.
4:30pm: This is my wrap-up time. I take a final look at my to-do list, finish any last minute tasks, respond to email, and do one last check on various areas of the community.
5:30pm-ish: Around this time I call it quits on most days.
Later: I usually try to check back in a couple of times in the evening and one last time before I go to bed. I try to avoid getting sucked into work, but if something critical comes in, I can deal with it.
Throughout the day: Like most people, I often have phone calls and meetings sprinkled around the day, along with email, IM, forum posts and more.

Now, I have many days that are far from typical. Some days I have 6:00am or 10:00pm meetings or, even worse, meetings all day. I also spend a fair amount of time traveling to conferences or have days where things are blowing up all over the place, but the above is as close to typical as I’ll ever get as a community manager.

How do you spend your day?
Main photo by Aaron Hockley of Hockley Photography, used with permission.

Alarm clock photo by Flickr user mela sogono, licensed under CC 2.0

Robot clock photo by Flickr user I am K.E.B, licensed under CC 2.0

Culver city clock photo by Flickr user vmiramontes, licensed under CC 2.0

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