Managed correctly from both sides, such working arrangements can be good for both parties. However, part-time web workers often need to do an even better job of managing client expectations and communications than full-time freelancers. Here are five tips for those considering web working outside of their day job for the first time:

1. Vet the side project thoroughly. Your success working remotely during off hours hinges on a number of things. First, there are some projects that lend themselves to such a working arrangement like technical writing, journalism, graphic design and web development, to name a few. It’s in your best interest to talk to the client and ask in-depth questions about the project, including quizzing them on access to stakeholders, technology and delivery dates. You may also run into potential clients who want full-time attention — even though it is supposed to be a part-time project — so take the time to thoroughly vet the project so you are absolutely comfortable with the working arrangement and can put together a statement of work that satisfies the client.
2. Respect Boundaries. One of the worst mistakes new part-time web workers make is to do their client work on their daytime employer’s time (and even use their daytime employer’s equipment to do it). This is unprofessional. Prior to taking on potential projects, you need to take stock of the boundaries you need to set between your day job, personal life and the side project(s). In regards to the day job, take advantage of a flexible work schedule — if available — for attending client conference calls and other activities. If you need to reschedule that lunch run off-site to call your client, so be it. The responsibilities of your day job and extracurricular projects should never affect each other. There might also be your day employer’s non-compete agreement to consider when taking side projects, so review any employment agreements carefully when considering taking on a side project.
3. Set Expectations Clearly. Too many times an outside contractor is brought in for a project that has already fallen off track. Coming in as a part-time off-site contractor puts you at a disadvantage in this scenario. It is prudent to be very upfront and honest about the time you have to put into the project and that you have a day job. If needed, establish times that you will check in via phone, IM, or email during the course of the project. Since you aren’t going to be in the same office as the other team members, it is up to you to maintain communications and not let the client slip into thinking they have full-time access to a part-time resource.
4. Schedule Work/Life Balance. It can be easy to drown yourself in work, especially if you’ve spent some time unemployed or underemployed. This means you have to run a tight calendar, including time for yourself. Just as you schedule time for deliverables and other work obligations, you should do the same for gym time, evenings off and much-needed personal time.
5. Embrace the Cloud. While the recent Gmail outage raised the ire of its users, as a part-time web worker you have no other option other than to embrace the cloud. While an email inbox serves as the document management tool of choice for way too many organizations, keeping your project artifacts online and available — even when you are not –  is paramount to the success of the project. There are services for all budgets from Google Sites and Zoho Projects, to BaseCamp to even hosted SharePoint sites. Keeping the project online means your client(s) will have full access to all project artifact,s even when you are fully ensconced in your day job.

If you have a day job, and freelance on the side, what tips do you have for managing side projects and clients?

Image by stock.xchng user Nintaro.

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I recently spoke with Nancy Juetten of Main Street Media Savvy about how to overcome the fear of publicity. The great thing about the tips that she offered is that many of them are things you might already be doing to some extent, which makes the whole idea of publicity a little less daunting. By becoming comfortable with these tactics, you’ll start inching your way into the limelight, and you’ll gain more attention for your business in the process.

Create a Compelling Bio

When someone takes the time to visit your web site, “About” page or social network profile, you have an opportunity to connect with that person and say something memorable that will help you stand out in his or her mind. By sharing what Nancy calls “succinct stories, stunning results, sassy soundbites and social information to help ideal clients connect,” you’ll attract more of the right kind of clients to your business.

Start and Maintain a Web Site, Blog and Newsletter.

While there are tons of new social media and networking opportunities online, it’s important not to neglect your hub, your primary home online, where you have control over the message you put out there. You want to shine the best light possible on your business, and consistently maintaining a high quality web site, blog and newsletter provides a sound foundation to establish you as the “go-to” expert in your field.

Contribute to Online Networks, Forums and Blogs.

With the base of your content covered by your web site and blog, you can branch out and find new prospects and connections online through a variety of social networking platforms, as well as other blogs that serve your ideal client or customer. Find ways to regularly contribute in meaningful ways, and you’ll start to capture the attention of people who are interested in what you have to offer.

Explore Audio and Video

Perhaps writing is not your forte. Maybe you prefer communicating vocally or visually, in which case, a regular podcast or videocast might be right for you. For search engine optimization purposes, it’s important to continue to write relevant content, but a podcast or videocast can help you connect with a broader market by appealing to those who prefer formats other than the written word.

Write e-Books and Special Reports

There’s no better way to position yourself as an expert than to offer a variety of helpful content on your site, and e-books, special reports and white papers are great resources to add to the mix. The best part is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch. Once per quarter or even once per year, go through your blog and collect articles that relate to specific themes. Then put that collection of articles into e-book format. If you don’t have the time, consider hiring a virtual assistant to put it together for you.

Host Tele-seminars and Workshops

Everyone has something to teach and unique experiences to share. Why not use this as an opportunity to reach out to more customers and clients? By providing occasional workshops and tele-seminars, you can highlight your expertise and perhaps prompt prospects who have been sitting on the fence to take action. Connect with other professionals who provide services that complement your own, and you’ll benefit from shared marketing and promotion of the events.

Write for Others

Opportunities abound for writing content, whether it’s for the local media, business journals, or other blogs. Regularly post to free services like Blogger Linkup with the types of articles you can contribute, or subscribe to services like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and watch for opportunities that apply to you or your business. You’ll soon find that you have more opportunities to write than you can handle. By contributing to other blogs that focus on the same audience, you can grow your own readership and potentially find new customers and clients.

Publicity doesn’t have to be a scary thing. In most cases, it involves doing things that you’ve already considered that don’t seem like publicity at all. Nancy suggests starting with five things you’re comfortable doing and then form a habit out of them. Once you establish well-formed habits with those tactics, consider adding a few more to the mix.

How do you consistently promote your business? What tactics have you found to be most successful?

Flickr image by codepo8

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Brown herself puts it this way:

“Just as startling, these new alternative workers are not overwhelmingly low-income. They’re college-educated Americans who earn more than $75,000 a year.

Welcome to the age of Gigonomics.”

Photo by Aaron Hockley

Most of the web workers I know tend to be college educated people with reasonably good incomes, and I suspect that most of the people described in the group above are web workers. Many web workers, and I include myself in this group, would never have become freelancers or otherwise left traditional jobs to telecommute from home without the rise of ubiquitous online technology. Fifteen years ago, many of the careers that web workers now enjoy didn’t even exist or would not have been possible given the technology available prior to the early to mid-1990s. While some early versions of the technologies we now take for granted existed back then, the adoption was still very low. Many companies weren’t online at all, and email was used by some people, but not everyone.

This leads me to wonder: What I would be doing now if the Internet really had been a fad, instead of a technology that changed the way that we live and work today?

My last couple of jobs as an online community manager would never have been possible without large numbers of people spending time online, and I doubt that I would have been hired by Intel in 2000, either. The job at Intel came out of my experience with eCommerce systems, and I landed the job by finding them on the web and submitting my resume into their online job candidate web site. This leads me back to my first job in at a Midwestern manufacturing company and the sobering realization that, today, I would probably still be working somewhere in an IT organization, toiling away in middle management bureaucracy if my web worker career hadn’t been possible.

Where would you be today if the internet had never really taken off and your career as a web worker evaporated in the mist?

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Over the holidays, I talked about how hard it is to explain what I do to family members, friends, and other people living in the regular world who find our web worker ways very foreign. This is complicated by my many side projects and diverse work that make it difficult to explain what I do in a concise way, which is another point that Tina Brown makes about how long it takes us to describe what we do in this new gig economy.

I usually respond with some variant of the rambling found below when someone asks me what I do.

“I’m a freelance online community and social media consultant who helps companies build online communities and social media strategies. My company is called Fast Wonder, and I also have a blog by that name where I talk about online communities, social media engagement, Yahoo Pipes, and other related topics. I also blog on Web Worker Daily. Oh, I’m also the community evangelist for a Portland startup called Shizzow. Or maybe you know me as one of the co-founders and board members of Legion of Tech, which organizes events like BarCampPortland and Ignite Portland. I also organize other events for geeks just for fun in my spare time …”

This is usually followed by questions about what all of this really means, how I make money doing this, or how I manage to do all of this without losing my mind.

How do you describe the breadth of what you do without sounding like a crazy person? Do we, as web workers, have our own language?

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Here’s the truth so far: web working on the road is harder than it looks. Even with all the research and planning, some things are bound to be different from what you’re expecting.

Internet Access

In a previous post, I mentioned how internet access should be one of the things you look into when researching travel destinations. This is especially important for us web workers, since it’s hard to anticipate what client queries or work emergencies you’ll need to attend to.

One option is to travel in areas that are known to have reliable internet connections. But doing this limits your number of possible destinations. Since I prefer to stay in remote provincial areas, it was logical for me to buy a 3G USB modem. This. device comes in handy for traveling web workers, and even if there’s no 3G access in some areas, you can still manage to use a GPRS connection (even if it’s rather slow).

Scheduling

Although you don’t need to plan every hour of your trip, it’s important to have a vague idea of what you’ll be doing each day. This will allow you to schedule some time for work. Just make sure you don’t spend most of your time on your laptop. If you spend 90% of your trip getting some work done, then it’s almost as if you stayed in your home office. Doing this would be missing the point. The key is to know which important work tasks you absolutely have to do within the same time frame as your trip. You can even try outsourcing some of your most basic tasks while you’re away.

Remember that traveling always involves waiting. You could be in the pier for three hours, waiting for the late ferry. You could be in the airport waiting to board your plane. Since waiting time is expected, know how to be productive when this happens. I spent most of my waiting time making notes on the articles I had to write, and jotting down the work tasks I have to do when I return. You can also use this time to recharge your gadgets.

I also strongly recommend doing even a bit of your work in advance – this is something I didn’t do very well for this trip (I got sick the week before I left). But if I were able to do that, I would’ve had the benefit of worrying less about work while I’m traveling.

Equipment

The general rule of traveling with gadgets is that you shouldn’t take more than what you need. Right now I have my small MSI Wind notebook, my cellphone, and the modem I mentioned earlier. This allows me to pack for a 2-week trip in a single backpack. In the future, I might opt to bring an extension cord or outlet multiplier with me, as some rooms have only one or two power outlets.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t take less than what you need either. While a netbook with a 10-inch monitor suits me well, graphic designers will no doubt have a much harder time with it. If it’s relevant to your work, and it’s hard for you to get things done without it, extra gadgets or a bigger laptop should be on your packing list.

Know how others have done it

The most comforting thing, for me at least, was that many people have worked on the road before. Here at WWD, Anne Zelenka interviewed Lea Woodward about her location-independent lifestyle. Imran Ali wrote about the traveling web working family of Tumblewagon. Tim Ferriss also discussed a similar concept in his book, “The 4-Hour Workweek”.

As internet connectivity becomes more prevalent, and as smaller devices become more affordable, it’s also no surprise that the number of traveling web workers is growing. It’s certain that you’ll find an experienced digital nomad who can give you all the advice and information you need. Hopefully, in a couple of years, I can be as wise and experienced as they are now.

Have you ever tried working on the road? What tips can you share based on your experience?

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It’s 1973 — Elvis has popularized the sequin jumpsuit, the country is embroiled in Watergate, and the term “telecommuter” is first coined.

No doubt because it’s not catchy enough for advertising, the Plantronics folks want to replace “telecommuter” with some other term for “today’s always-connected-but-not-always-in-the-office worker.” Actually, they want you to come up with it for them.

The entry form is simple: contact info, your new term, and an explanation. The prizes include $1700 worth of home audio gear and Calisto Pro phones, which we called “the web worker’s dream phone” last year. So winning won’t make you rich, but five minutes of work with the right idea might get you a nice new bit of gear.

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