The Creative Capitalist:

I have, it’s true, been somewhat underwhelmed with my LinkedIn experience. For me, it has proved nothing more than an extra step in the day-to-day process of keeping in touch. But as the comments on my blog have shown, that is not the case for everyone. And my policy is always to open the field to as many opinions as people can shout out. So I sent out a message to the YahooGroup for TopLinkedIn users, asking what LinkedIn does for them. Below are the responses I got, together with a bit of professional background on each of the respondents.

In addition to my “9 to 5″ job I edit a daily e-mail publication, the Transportation Communications Newsletter. The newsletter has over 6,500 subscribers and most of my contacts are people who are readers of the newsletter.

While I don’t use LinkedIn daily, it is helpful if I’m trying to find a contact in a company that I report on in the newsletter or if I want more information about one of my readers. I also find LinkedIn to be helpful in terms of staying up-to-date on what my contacts are doing. By checking it daily I see who’s updated their profile and know about new jobs contacts have.

I also do freelance voice work. Again, LinkedIn has been helpful in identifying contacts in companies of potential customers.

I don’t use the forwarding feature of LinkedIn, but I do tap my own contacts directly to get leads.

Bernie
Positions: Operations manager, editor
Industry: Transportation

In the past week or so I’ve spent some time recruiting people for the Ex-Convex LinkedIn group that I manage, and clarifying our membership policy. Being in a leadership position here provides opportunities for me to stay in better touch with my former co-workers and keep my name fresh in their minds.

I’ve been helping a long-time colleague and new LinkedIn connection learn his way around LinkedIn. We’ve both been experimenting with improving our visibility by answering questions in LinkedIn Answers. Our continued discussions have led him to become a new advertising client of mine. It’s never as simple as getting an introduction request and then signing a new business deal.

Danny
Position: Owner/consultant
Industry: Software

The fact that your LinkedIn profile is reviewed by people from within and outside your immediate network is a benefit, but I have yet to dollarize the results to date, and I am now hovering around 920 active members in my network. I probably will not grow my network into the thousands, as I prefer to connect to people where we can mutually benefit one another. So the long and the short of it, IMHO, is that LinkedIn, like many social networks, is a way to garner visibility, and hopefully have people link to your homepage, blog, etc… where you can build a following, create interest, and ultimately gain a business opportunity.

Mark
Position: Managing director
Industry: Information technology & services

I’ve only recently become more active on LinkedIn so am probably not a good example, but I did have someone recently contact me about some possible work through someone who was in our joint network. We’ll see if anything comes out of it. Also I think your LinkedIn profile comes up on a Google search, and someone once contacted me for a quote after doing a search, but nothing came out of that one.

Yvette
Position: Virtual assistant
Industry: Information services

I use LinkedIn for my ventures in the Entertainment business. Mostly, I use it to connect to other creatives and production people with ideas for reality shows, scripts and other entertainment ventures.

Dylan
Position: Freelance television producer
Industry: Entertainment

I am a legal recruiter and have been trying to understand why lawyers have not adopted LinkedIn in the same number as other industries. The key complaint is based in the Q&A piece: Lawyers want to use the system by answering legal questions! But the system allows anyone to answer and incorrect answers to be marked “best answer” etc..

R. Raymond May
Position: Recruiter/managing partner
Industry: Legal services
Blog: www.zebriod1.blogspot.com

In the past couple of weeks, I have tried to utilize LinkedIn in the way its makers ostensibly intended. I have not attempted to “connect” with people I don’t know (that is the final frontier), but I’ve experimented with all the LI capabilities that relate to people I do know.

In a most unscientific manner, here are my findings:

• Only 20 percent of my contacts are on LinkedIn.
• Only 10 percent of them are active on LinkedIn.
• Out of 350 invitations sent, 120 still remain outstanding.
• Three people have already e-mailed me directly to inform me that they don’t use LinkedIn and would like to continue communicating using traditional methods.
• Four people have said they were going to accept my invite but didn’t, so I still talk to them via Yahoo Mail, on the phone or at happy hour.
• Three people have reported that they tried to connect but weren’t able to.
• Two people have emailed me back to say hello but have not accepted my LinkedIn invite.
• Six people have said they didn’t know me.
• Of that number, two realized straightaway that it was an accident. They tried to fix the record on LinkedIn, but it wasn’t possible. Three more would probably do the same thing if I said anything, but I don’t want to deal with it because we all have better things to do right now. When I do contact them again, it will be directly, for a specific purpose other than rectifying a social networking mixup.
• I asked five people for recommendations. Of that number, three recommended me. One ignored my request but updated my website (we’ve got a trade deal, and right now I’m getting the best of it). The final person said “No, because I think LinkedIn doesn’t do justice to either the recommending party or the recommendee. I will give you any personal recommendation you want and help you in any way I can, but I will not write anything on that website.”
• I recommended several colleagues. Only two wrote back to acknowledge that they’d seen and liked what I’d said.
• I forwarded two job requests from contacts and got no responses.

My verdict for LinkedIn’s potential as a a contact management/networking system? It takes too much work.

Too much exporting. Too many notes to write. Too much managing, mollycoddling and appeasing the LinkedIn police. Seriously. In a normal world, my contacts just sit in my address book till I need them, at which point I e-mail the appropriate person and say:

Hi! Here’s who I am, what I’m working on, and what I need. Can you help?

They say yes or no, and we move on.

In a LinkedIn world, I e-mail tons of them for no reason except to say: “Hi. Do you remember that we know each other? Okay, so let’s publicly acknowledge that we know each other, and then let’s go on about our business and not ever answer our LinkedIn e-mails anymore b/c we don’t really use LinkedIn for e-mail, we use Outlook or Gmail or Yahoo like every other person in the civilized world.”

Then you sit and wait for all those contacts to jump on your bandwagon. Probably only 50 do. An additional 45 languish in your archives. If you’re me (large network, but some of ‘em I only talk to once a year), a few people will e-mail to say “How do we know each other?” You explain, they say “Wassup? Good to hear from you!” and that’s the end of it.

The final two or three say “I Don’t Know This Person,” which makes you feel unmemorable, not very charismatic and also like a LinkedIn pariah, because you know you get spanked for those IDKs. So you e-mail them and say, “What the heck, am I that forgettable?” And they say “Nooooo!” and try to fix the setting but can’t, and then everyone’s irritated.

But still. I’m going to complete the final bit of this journal soon. I will e-mail five contacts and see whether the LinkedIn job networking thing really works. Maybe it will, and I’ll get tons of gigs and be forced to take back everything I said. Wouldn’t that be nice?

In the meantime, I’ve got 120 outstanding invitations that I really need to deal with, and I think sending 120 individual notes is the only way to do it. Which really defeats the purpose of LinkedIn, but reconnects with lost contacts; which is something worth doing, regardless of the communication mode.

“LinkDaddy” Marc Freedman owns the software company RazorPop in addition to several other small businesses in the technology and digital media sectors. He also runs the Dallas-based networking group Dallas Blue. In four years, Freedman has built up a LinkedIn database of 20,000 people worldwide. In this Q&A, the entrepreneur/consultant/uber-networker discusses LinkedIn’s capabilities as a business tool and beyond.

First, please describe how LinkedIn is different from the online networking of yore.
LinkedIn is a service that encompasses a feature set involved with bringing your offline network into the online world and increasing your online network through social networking tools.

LinkedIn is actually a very limited tool. At the end of the day, all it’s good for is being a huge database to connect on a direct personal basis with other people. Conceptually, it’s simple. (The LinkedIn developers) like to think of themselves as Web 2.0, but they are very far from Web 2.0. This is not a place to manage groups or manage contacts. Really, it’s just a place to find other people. The real key is how you integrate that with your business. It depends on what you need to do for your business or other aspects of your life.

Click here to learn the basic uses for LinkedIn.

Doesn’t maintaining a large network (on or off LinkedIn) ever become counterproductive–like a second (unpaid) job?

Networking is an institution and activity that has its own logic and philosophy. It’s not tit for tat, I do something for you and you do for me. It is the proverbial “pay it forward” mentality. I’ve been doing this for a number of years, and it’s taken three or four years for my network to come back and pay off in a substantial way. It’s really like any investment. If you understand and have a long-term perspective, time and inclination, it can pay off.
The only expectation you can have of online networking is that it’s an opportunity. If a request or announcement meets your criteria, you will forward it. You start a conversation with the expectation that you will reciprocate if and when you can.
Here’s an example: I have a programmer–a former employee and good friend who now lives in Buenos Aires. We were chatting, and he says, “I have a problem.” His dog–a 150-pound Rottweiler–was very sick, losing his hair, and was possibly going to die. He needed a zinc formulation that you can’t get in Buenos Aires, but can buy on Amazon for $10. So I bought it and shipped it, but it never got there. It turns out because of drug trafficking laws, the import of any product like that is banned.
Now my friend was in a real bind, and he said, “Mark, you know people; what can you do?” Because of my network, I had 100 connections who either lived or had lived in Argentina. I sent out an SOS, and within two days I received 20 responses–everything from “My brother’s a chemist” to “I know someone who works at Argentinean consulate and can help you.” It happened because of this large online network.
On your LinkedIn recommendations, I read one from a man who had gone from only having a few connections to having 1,000. How?
Mylink500.com is what he used. It’s a directory of top LinkedIn networkers, as well as open networkers. If you go to the site, they say they’re open to invitations from other members. Download a list, and invite everybody on the list. There are about 1,200 people in the database; it’s pretty easy to add 1,000 connections that way.
In that case, though, wouldn’t the connections be superficial? How could they be useful if they didn’t even know him a day ago?
I don’t think it’s limited to that. If I were to segregate the (networking) universe in three classes, there would be:

• People with large, weak networks. A lot of them are recruiters. They have lots of people on file, but they don’t use or support their network in a material way.

• Large networkers who are active in supporting their networks. If you have 500-plus contacts in your network, you can’t have a strong connection with each of them. But you can actively manage your network–spend a few hours each week processing requests and helping people if you can. It becomes incumbent upon you to develop a strategy and process about acquiring and building your network.

• Strong networkers. Far and away, this comprises the majority of LinkedIn users. These are people with 50 to 300 contacts, each one of which is a strong connection.

The fundamental relationship on LinkedIn is to forward referrals and accept updates from one another, and that’s it. The rest is going to be based on the quality of relationship. If people don’t know each other, there’s neither an expectation nor a likelihood that they’re going to help each other out in any way.

What’s step 2 for this man if he wants to strengthen his existing network?

If he’s a job seeker, there are two potential ways. The first is to use the existing network to send out an update which might well be, “I’m looking for a new job.” I think that’s what he did. Clearly if he can continue to expand his network, one would think the size of his network would be proportional to new job leads.
The second would be where the value is: the ability to target your network. Target hiring managers, executives and decision-makers in your field. Find these people, get referred and secure informational interviews, starting on LinkedIn.

He also said that out of those 1,000 connections, he got one solid job offer. In my business, that’s a pretty low return rate. How could he raise the percentage?

But that’s marketing. That’s like saying I’ve been alive for X amount of years, and I’ve only gotten so many job leads per year of life. It’s not directly measurable. To say one job lead out of 1,000 contacts is bad, I disagree. One job lead in two days is better than he had been getting, which was nothing.

You mentioned on the LinkedIn message boards that you felt that some people you didn’t know were taking advantage of the system to request recommendations from you. Could you talk about that?

The salient issue is not what I as forwarder should do. Anyone who receives a message can and should in good conscience do what he or she wants. The problem is from the sender’s perspective. Because of poor design on LinkedIn, they don’t make it clear that a recommendation from a former colleague/supervisor is very different from a personal recommendation. A job recommendation means you actually worked with this person and can recommend his or her work.

Many people who are inexperienced and don’t understand nuances don’t think it through and treat the work referral as a standard introduction referral because that’s how LinkedIn handles it. From the forwarder’s perspective, you want to help somebody, but you can’t give him or her the recommendation because you didn’t work with him or her. It makes that person look bad, and you look bad because of poor design on LinkedIn’s part, so anyone requesting would really want to be cognizant of that.

According to some LinkedIn users, there are different levels of LinkedIn, which correspond with different kinds of networking. So an open networker such as yourself might use the tool much differently than “closed networkers” who have always made a practice of safeguarding their contacts.

I’m not familiar with your industry, but I am with recruiters. There are clearly a small number of recruiters that subscribe to that theory:”I’m not going to share lists; I’m not even going to forward requests.” My philosophy is, it’s a huge world out there, and we’re all big boys and girls. I think having a closed network like that is ultimately counterproductive.

One of the things about LinkedIn that’s a huge detractor but I think is ultimately a positive in this discussion is that there’s no qualitative aspect to connections. All someone outside may know is that you and I are connected. They have no idea what the nature of the relationship is. We might have gone to school together, we might be neighbors or we might have an intimate business relationship. From the perspective of shared media lists, the value is not always in having the name. The value comes from the relationship.

And the flip side is, if these people are already on LinkedIn, they’re going to find them anyway. Whether they find them through you becomes irrelevant. They can contact them with or without your help.

There’s a lot of talk about “paying it forward,” but it seems most normal, entry-level networkers have no idea what that means. It’s almost like they’re going around looking for a handout. Doesn’t that glut up the system?

If you put yourself out there in any way, you open yourself up to people on the fringe. Post your e-mail address and you’ll get legitimate inquiries, and you’ll also get spam. You’ll get unsolicited invitations and people who make assumptions. If you’re building a large network, there will be a lot of inexperienced networkers–people with different expectations who don’t share the same values as you. This doesn’t just apply to LinkedIn.

How would you respond to the naysayers?

There are a lot of people who feel that LinkedIn is a waste of time. They don’t see any value. I first would say there are absolutely industries and professions where LinkedIn is going to have less value. It’s not going to be accessible to you at a business level if your business is selling residential energy in Texas or if you’re working for Amway or if you’re selling prepaid insurance.
But there is a lot of value besides making business prospects.
The thing is, it’s damn complicated. If you don’t come at it with appropriate expectations, it’s not going to be worth your time and effort. It’s going to be a bad experience. It provides no support, the customer service is horrible, and it’s difficult to get into. So that attitude is perfectly understandable.

One of the hazards of networking on a place like this is if someone says they don’t know you, you get penalized–even if they try to change the response later. How do you allay that? Is it worth the risk?

In my opinion, this is atrocious design on LinkedIn’s part. A year ago they had a “no” button that carried no consequences. Today, people don’t have a way to say no. They receive an invitation, and they can accept it, archive it or say “I don’t know.” With the current system, archiving is the same thing as saying “No.” But to most people, archiving means “I don’t want to think about it.” Most people click “I don’t know this person” because that’s the option closest to what they want to do. Most people who click on it would not do so if they knew the repercussions.

Do you keep your entire address book open to your connections?
I don’t. I did have at one point, but if you have 500-plus connections, browsing leads to a bad experience. The default account setting allows people to browse your connections, and in general I recommend use it because it’s good networking and is valuable to the browser. The problem is, if you have too many pages–and I have several hundred–it leads to bad networking. LinkedIn displays 90 connections per page, and there’s no way to search them. So you can’t target through browsing.
Also, the expectations are different. You can’t make the overarching assumption of a strong mutual connection if someone has a large network. Although you’re in my network, Lena, someone shouldn’t assume that the best way to reach Lena is to go through Marc. To find you, they should go through the best/strongest connections– someone who can give them the best referral. And to find my best/strongest connections, they would need to ask directly, not browse.
For more LinkedIn resources, visit:

http://linkedin.pbwiki.com/

Freda Kunin is the founder and owner of FREDALA.com, an online store that sells dangly earrings and funky patent leather belts and all kinds of other inexpensive but super-cool items you may have seen in the pages of Us Magazine recently.  Her stock is “specialized, like you’d find in high-end boutiques,� and she showcases collections by many up-and-coming designers.  She also spearheads “Success Is in the Bag,� a fashion recycling program that benefits women in sponsored upward mobility programs.

Freda started her store in 1999, which makes her a veteran internet entrepreneur. She figured out e-commerce and HTML coding on her own, during a time when 90% of techies were male.  And she built a successful business from scratch, without backers or partners.

Unsurprisingly, when you ask, “HOW?!� she’s more than likely to shrug and say, “I just figured it couldn’t be that hard.�  But when I explain that what seems “not that hard� to her might be downright impossible for, say, ME, she proves adept at articulating processes, and naming information sources. So here I am to pass all that good stuff along to you. (Except I still can’t help you with coding. You either get it or you don’t…and I don’t. Sorry.)

(Note: After you read this Q&A, check the post below to get Freda’s list of marketing resource sites and tips.)

Lena: What inspired you to plunge into the e-commerce world way back in ’99?

Freda:  It was very instinctual. I was working for Sony Pictures, and there was a lull one day, and I started reading a story about e-commerce. Since I was so busy, I didn’t ever have time to go shopping as a consumer, so I put two and two together. And everybody was always asking, “Where do you get this, where do you get that?� about what I was wearing. So I thought, Maybe I do have an eye.

L: How did you puzzle your way through the earliest e-commerce systems all on your own? I remember working in e-commerce in ’98—half the time, the software would ship with no manual, and even the techies couldn’t figure out how to use it.

F:  I eventually went to Yahoo stores, but even so, you still had to figure out how to make your site look different. They provide a very basic template and a cart. I learned quickly, because I had to… There’s something special about putting your name on a company. Having my name on there,  I couldn’t see doing things halfway.

L: Do you sell through eBay, Amazon, etc?

F: No. My only eBay sales were unique items. And I used the Yahoo interface, so I never used the Amazon site. I’m no longer using the Yahoo store interface because we’ve grown so much I need my own server.

L: That being the case, how do you market and advertise?

F: I use a combination of paid search and organic search. SEO optimization is a constant challenge. Every time you change your platform, it affects your position in search engines… I read a lot. That’s how you learn—what is this site, and what are its parameters? If you’re really concerned about your Alexa ranking, get into Alexa and read about it.

You have to get on a lot of merchant boards. Often, people will share what worked for them. Then you constantly tweak.

L: Can you recommend a good site for people who want to learn about SEO?

F: I would recommend, for example, the Monster Commerce boards. You’ll see what real merchants are going through. You also can find out about different shopping carts, gateways, and certain combinations.

L: Please explain.

F: Say you’re trying to join some large affiliate program. It’s important to find out in advance if the shopping cart system you’re hooked up with is compatible with that affiliate program. A lot of times the company representative will say, “Oh yeah, we are,� and then you find out later, they’re not. You really have to research before you take them at their word.

L: How do you balance the back-end nuts and bolts with the creative, fun side of your business?

F:  I’m lucky enough to have a staff, so I can delegate a lot of the nuts and bolts. My love of accessories, I think, is what drives me. I’m constantly shopping—not physically, but virtually. I do read the fashion blogs, I try to check out and see who the new up-and-coming designers, I go to the Mart. I constantly keep my ear to the ground. I just went to the hundred-year anniversary for Neiman Marcus, where they had only 20 clients.

L: What percentage of your browsing/buying takes place in “the real world,� and what percentage is virtual?

F: I’d say 75% is virtual. I can do it any time, from anywhere, wearing anything…

L: Ah, yes, and that’s the appeal of being an entrepreneur. People think you can work on a beach, under a palm tree…

F:  No, no. I can’t work from under a palm tree. I have an actual warehouse, an actual staff—people working from 7AM to 8PM. As an owner, you have to be hands-on; you have to be watching. Also, people think because you’re self-employed you don’t have to follow the hours of the rest of the world. But more and more, you do. You still have to work within the parameters of the business world.

L: When did you know it was time to hire your first employee?

F: When I had to give my two-week notice to my day job.

L: So, you went directly from working a day job to having a staff?

F:  Yes. When I quit my day job, that’s when I knew I was too busy. I’d say another error business owners often make is trying to do everything themselves, and not being realistic. You cannot do everything alone. You will have to farm out to other independent contractors…you’ll certainly need some kind of assistance.

L: How did you figure out what to delegate?

F:  I’m always tweaking that too. I think you have to. For example, right now we have an outside IT person.  I used to do all that stuff myself.

 L:  Let’s talk about the bag recycling program –

F: It’s called Success is in the Bag. Ladies from all over the country and Canada send us gently worn or new handbags. We issue them gift certificate codes that they can use to purchase products from our store. Then we donate the handbags to New Economics for Women, and they get distributed to teens, unmarried mothers… It’s a great program. These girls are going out, applying for jobs, and it helps them feel better about themselves—helps them look and feel more polished and professional.

L: When did you come up with it, and why?

F: I had been discussing a recycling program.  I wanted to do something that aligned with my business.  We’re now in our third year.

L: What’s next?

F: I’m launching another online store that’ll focus on handbags, and I also plan to start designing myself.

Ed note: Yes, and next year when you’re onstage accepting your CFDA award, you’ll be like, “I figured it couldn’t be that hard…”

Check out Freda’s resource and tip list  in the post below. Also visit FREDALA.com for early Xmas shopping, or if you’d like to buy me a li’l something to show your appreciation.

Though Monster Commerce (part of Network Solutions) is a providor of shopping cart/site solutions for small and large businesses, their small business page has some really useful information in easy to digest format and some great SEO tools as well: www.monstersmallbusiness.com

It’s always a good idea to checkout the top 500 International sites, as by blogging on or somehow linking from them to you will help increase your site’s exposure. You should narrow this list down to find blogs and sites relevant to your business and goals.

And, if you are already using an existing service already, check out their community’s blogs and bulletin boards to learn what tricks and tips current users can offer you and feel free to communicate with other bloggers. Most people will be happy to share their insights with you and remember to please share with them as well. We check out the forums on monstersmallbusiness.com.

Don’t forget our government at www.business.gov.

And the SBA for great tips and assistance and its free online courses , including those specifically for ecommerce:
Building Your Website *
South-West Texas SBDC
Managing the Digital Enterprise

Sites you want to avoid are those trying to directly and only sell to you tips like these which you can compile pretty much yourself! Check out this handy guide from the  FTC.
My top tip is: Do not try to reinvent the wheel, but do try to improve on it. Tech is too technical and changing all the time. Find sites you love and ask yourself why you love them, and use those features in yours!

And of course, here is the link to our Success is in the Bag campaign … Tired of that old bag? Send it in and receive a $20 merchandise credit toward a new one! Did you know you can earn merchandise credit toward FredaLA merchandise by helping us help others?

An unspoken but general golden rule for all conference/junket/convention/meeting organizers these days is, Provide all attendees with internet access, preferably free, for the duration of the event. One of my favorite planners broke this commandment last week, and compounded his mistake by leaving town and letting his assistant handle the fallout. Can you imagine my consternation?

I did not expect to be offline from Wednesday through Saturday, but I did know that I’d have precious little time at the computer, so I prepared accordingly. (Not so for one of my colleagues, who had promised an editor that he’d complete certain assignments from the road, and was visibly jaw-grinding by Friday.) Nonetheless, when I came back to civilization Saturday night, an untidy little mountain of urgent business had accumulated on my desk. Which is why I’m working on a Sunday at 11:30PM.

My to-do list, by the numbers:

3 invoices to send by Monday AM

1 contract to find, sign and fax over to editor.

5 sources to find for story, deadline tomorrow… (5-ALARM URGENT)

3 bills to pay immediately

2 sample columns to tweak and resubmit.

1 flattering picture to submit as contributor photo for new sexy column. (HOPELESS)

1 dog to take to groomer, stat. (Sitter took him to beach. My house is a sandpit.)

4 thank-you notes to write

15 followups to make on old queries

250 email blasts from PRs, wire services, etc. to open, scan and/or file

6 hours I’ll wish I was sleeping, but instead will be burning midnight oil

3 hours I’ll actually probably sleep tonight.

It has been 100 days since I submitted a project, and the client has not paid me.

This is a normal situation in the freelance world, but not a normal situation in my world, because I don’t typically work with companies that pull this kind of nonsense. However. There are exceptions to every rule. And my rules around payment are pretty flexible. They have to be, until that wonderful, oft-dreamed-of day when I get to call all the shots.

I actually have different sets of rules for advertising clients, publishing/editorial clients and film/TV companies. Since the current 100-day laggard is a publisher, I’ll start with that:

1. Make sure you get a reasonable rate from the very first assignment. If it’s too low, you’ll feel under-valued and over-worked, and may try to only “phone in� the assignment, which is bad for all concerned.

(A lot of creatives get sucked into the underbidding game–witness Craigslist, Tjobs and a zillion auction sites I haven’t bothered to remember. To some extent, you must underbid when you’re starting out, but it’s a slippery slope, because someone will always underbid you. Overbidding will earn you more respect, as long as you can back it up.)

2. If you’re getting a decent fee, one round of editing is acceptable. If it’s a fairly high fee, two rounds (though you should always aim for perfection on the first go-round, of course).

3. Factor in additional legwork (i.e. obtaining artwork, getting recipes, connecting clients with PRs, etc.). A bit of this is okay; any more, and the client is taking advantage. Remember, you’re not getting paid by the hour.

4. Keep track of elapsed time from the day you invoice to the day you get paid.

Anything under 30 days is excellent–you should continue working with the client, even if they don’t pay all that well. Thirty to 45 days is normal—if the client has been fairly easy to work with, and is paying a decent fee, keep working with them. If they’ve been a pain, or if the fee is low, don’t query them any more. Look for better clients. If this client wants you bad enough to come after you, then let them do it. That puts more of the power in your hands. Negotiate better terms the next time around.

Anything after 45 days is only acceptable if it’s a “prestige� client, or if terms were established at the outset.

Anything after 60 days is only acceptable if the client is a straight-up golden goose. Invoice them in big chunks, and don’t count on them for your day-to-day expenses

As you can easily see, this magazine is so far out of my normal scope, it’s laughable. But I had my reasons for letting it get this way. I met the editor through a mutual friend, so I was warmly predisposed to her. When we were working together, I liked her a lot. And I know her magazine is a startup, so I would never depend on it to actually pay my bills. It’s more of a just-for-fun gig. Finally, she’s well connected–and she’s indicated that she can use those connections to help me. So in the end, this client was never really about the money.

Let me rephrase: It was never just about the money. But I’m not running a charity service, and I never indicated that I was. So, friends or not, it’s time to start emailing every person in that office. One of them will get my check cut, ready or not. They don’t know it yet, but they will.

It’s one of life’s great ironies, isn’t it? “Creative” types are legendarily bad at business—or maybe just loathe to get involved. We (yes, I’m one of them) would much rather focus on our art, be it writing or music or pot-throwing or creative cake icing. Yet the minute that art starts turning a profit, the artist lands smack-dab in the business world—do not pass “GO;â€? do not receive $200 unless you negotiate ahead of time, invoice for it, and have a contract on file.

If you take a corporate job, your muse is on loan from 9-5, Monday through Friday. And if you decide to take the plunge and go freelance, or start your own company…well, that’s when you end up on a site like this. Because like it or not, building a successful creative business is 20% about the �creative,� and 80% about that thing we love to hate.

We’ve all heard that before. However, perhaps some of you haven’t seen it in the practical, day-to-day sense. University courses don’t teach it, and I’m sorry to say, neither do those “special seminars� that charge you $1500 and promise that you’ll soon be living on a tropical island.

That’s where I come in: As a columnist, corporate creative consultant and digital content maven, I’m constantly working on cool projects for Disney, Sony, MGM and various other big names. I do not live on a tropical island; I live in LA. And I do not work while lounging under a palm tree on a white sand beach. Sun on the monitor + white sand in the keyboard = BAD.

Maybe you’ve already guessed this, but I am here to deliver a mechanical, unromantic and decidedly un-creative account of my so-called glamorous job, from the proposal writing to the cold calls to the health insurance questions to the ongoing search for the perfect CMS tool. Sections are outlined below.

Strategery – Yes, I’m borrowing from an SNL skit. But this topic is serious. Pitching, follow-ups, networking, promotion, packaging, branding, the whole nine.

The Client Speaks – Interviews with decision-makers. These are the people who can give you the contracts. Contrary to what you think, they do not reside in ivory towers.

Laptop Meditations – I am opinionated. Sometimes I like to rant. Sometimes I like to lecture. This is the section where I get to do it. (My blog, my prerogative.)

Nuts & Bolts – The stuff we all hate, but have to deal with anyway. Health insurance, taxes, telecom, filing software, Web site management, money matters.

Meet My Network – They say you can judge a woman by the company she keeps. That’s why I’m so proud to know, and work with, amazing people all over the world. Here’s where I get to brag on their behalf.

Resources – We live in an age of information overload. Happily, I’ve spent roughly one zillion hours sifting through it, and am happy to pass the good stuff (and the “danger zone� warnings) along to you. ‘Cause I’m nice. And I enjoy making lists.