WWD Roundup: Surviving the Coming Shakeout

There’s no need to rehearse the latest round of bleak economic news once again. Now that it’s widely agreed that large parts of the world are in a recession, it’s time to focus our efforts on our core constituency: the web workers. Economic contraction is a mixed blessing for us. On the one hand, experience in working in an agile fashion, with the ability to draw on the worldwide internet for your clientele, is a big plus. But on the other, with traditional jobs vanishing for some people, there’s likely to be an influx of new web workers – leading to the potentially difficult scenario of too many web workers chasing too little work.

As a web worker who cares about your career, it’s just plain good sense to do what you can to make sure that your income survives increased competition. Fortunately, WWD has offered plenty of advice on that score over the years. Here are an even dozen of our best articles and tips for supercharging your career.

Manage Your Online Presence

As a web worker, you are who you are online. While you’re unlikely to make the most obvious of mistakes (unlike those poor people who post drunken photos on MySpace and live to regret it when applying for a job), managing your online presence is a proactive endeavor. You need to think about what face you’re presenting to current and potential clients.

Build Your Brand

Your online presence is the sum of all of your activities on the internet, but your brand is both more focused and more diffuse. On the one hand, it’s a subset of your online presence that’s designed to quickly tell potential customers what you offer and why they should pay for it. On the other, good branding extends past online to other interactions with your clientele.

Pursue New Work, and New Types of Work

Now is a good time to review whether you’re trying to get all of the work that you can do. Is your career definition too narrow? Are you doing enough to get the word out?

Keep Your Costs Under Control

If your income stream is looking potentially shaky, the time to take action is now, not when you actually run out of money. In addition to pursuing new work, you can take advantage of the web and the culture surrounding web working to lower your costs of doing business.

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