Although I’ve been designing and developing websites since 1996, I’ve only been freelancing for the past two years. I thought most of the learning curve was going to be about taxes and time management, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of what I’ve learned is actually about my own professional strengths and limitations, in ways that didn’t become apparent until I struck out on my own.

Here are five things I’ve learned that I wish I’d know then:

1. Work Good Projects with Good People

This took me a long time to figure out, and along the way I seriously cocked this one up a few times. The biggest mistake I’ve made is working with people I really, really like on projects I liked a whole lot less. These projects tend to be the very last ones finished, and the people who really, really liked me to start out with probably like me considerably less at the end.

Lesson: Love both the people and the project.

2. Agencies Suck

The money is often tempting, but these projects almost always go to shit. The agency sits between you and the client, and any client large enough to employ a PR or advertising agency is probably less of a client and more of a committee anyway.  Not a single agency project from the past two years appears in my portfolio. And not a single one ever will, because I am never taking another agency job ever again.

Lesson: Do not return agency phone calls.

3. Clingy Clients Cost Money

This one was hard to learn, because I get a lot of calls from people who are being screwed over, have serious site problems, or are completely clueless. And I really, truly want to help these people but I have learned to be a little more streetwise about why they are facing the problems they are facing. There are clients out there who will very sweetly suck all your time, energy and patience and while they may be nice people, they are not good clients.

Lesson: You can’t help everyone.

4. I’m Not an Ass (Wo)man

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that back end design is not a good long-term project for me. I have always previously done this work leading teams, and now I know why. I can certainly look at your back end, spot the problems, and help you reorganise it to be much better, but if I have to design and code every screen, I’m going to die of boredom and you are going to die waiting.

Lesson: Learn your professional limitations.

5. You Can’t Work All the Time

I’ve tried. My jaunt to Florence in December was my first vacation since my honeymoon five years ago. But I’m 37, and it’s become obvious I cannot maintain the same pace I could at 27. I have been seriously ill three times in the last two years, which is something of a record even for me, and I’m pretty sure it’s my body’s retribution for relentless 18-hour days. Scheduling time away from work is very hard, but it also recharges my creativity and focus.

Lesson: If you don’t make time for down time, you’re going down anyway.

One of the most predictable questions clients ask just before their new site goes live is “How do I get press coverage for my site launch?” My uniform but depressing answer is “Why would you get press coverage for your site launch?”

The harsh reality is that few news outlets are going to cover the launch of a site, because guess what – it isn’t news. New web sites launch daily in their thousands, and no matter how special you think your unique snowflake may be, it just isn’t that special.

Therefore, if you want media coverage, you need to actually make news. Here is how we did that for Ciara Crossan at WeddingDates.ie, where you can search for available reception venues based on your chosen wedding date and location. The hook in Step 2 will be different for every site, but the basic methodology is the same for all the clients I’ve been through this with.

1. Relate your product or service to something current in the news.

We’re diving head first into a recession, and the media has an endless appetite for recession stories. Weddings cost an average of 20K, so there’s probably a news story nicely nestled between big ticket items and topical budget cutting that we can tease out.

2. Find or create a hook that legitimately ties in your business.

To create our news story, we designed the 2008 Wedding Budget Survey using a free PollDaddy survey, and asked brides and grooms if the recession was impacting their wedding budgets. Ciara got a lovely prize sponsored by one of her hotels to lure 100 people in for the survey, and then we crunched all the data to get some nice beefy stats.

3. Write a really good press release.

There are two tricks here. The first is: do not write a press release. Instead, write the story you want the papers to run. (See press release here.) Format it like a press release and call it a press release, but make it easy for busy journalists to see the whole story by writing it yourself – preferably really well.

The second trick is to make the press release about your news story but work your client into it so seamlessly that it is almost impossible to cover one without the other. When done well, you’ll have about a 90% success rate with this.

4. Distribute it to a hand-picked media list.

Ciara’s homework assignment while I was doing 1, 2 and 3 was to buy all the papers and magazines for a full two weeks and start pulling names and contact details for people and editors covering this kind of story. Regional contact details came from the book. We targeted lifestyle, business and women’s sections of national and local newspapers and magazines.

5. Be available to respond to media calls and emails.

Ciara got loads of calls and contacts after sending out her release. Some outlets just ran the press release; others were more interested and called for interviews and sent photographers. Some ran the survey story and some ran more general pieces about her. It doesn’t matter; they would never have run any of these stories if she’d simply sent out a standard new website release.

So the press release did its job and generated several news stories:

• The Sun
• The Echo (full page in Women on Wednesday)
• The Cork Independent
• The Kingdom
• The Kerryman
• The Corkman

Bridal mags print quarterly, so we’re still waiting to see what, if anything, pops up there, but that’s a nice result with a good regional spread.

One thing I would encourage anyone to do before embarking on a campaign like this, however, is to really consider the benefit of traditional press. Because honestly, for a lot of businesses, there is no benefit. Read that again: there is no benefit.

Newspaper mentions and even radio and television coverage will not result in the traffic bump on your site that you expect. Let’s face it -  The Sunday Business Post is not The Colbert Report, so if you’re hoping for a Colbert Bump from a mention in the Irish media, you’re likely to be sadly disappointed. Online links are likely to bring you far more traffic, so for most small businesses, time is better invested generating online coverage than offline coverage.

However, there are at least two instances where it is worth pursuing traditional media:

• Investors – If you have a pool of investors or a board of directors, these people just love being handed a big fat press clippings file. It’s a tangible result they understand.
• Stakeholders – In Ciara’s case, the hotels listing on her site are her stakeholders, and all this press lends huge credibility when she goes out to sell to them. As Mulley points out, this kind of traditional PR is about reputation.

I am not a professional PR person and I don’t have the contacts that might have resulted in more national coverage for this story. However, I’ve also seen some of the big PR agency price tags, and I’m pretty confident that with our little DIY press campagn, we got 80% of the bang for about 10% of the buck. If you’re a bigger company or situated more offline than online, it’s probably worth it to bring professional PR on board. But if you’re bootstrapping your online business, it’s worth knowing that like Irish brides, you can DIY it for less.

Above are the presentation slides for yesterday’s Blogging Master Class. Though they only formed a small part of the course, I fully intended to get them up last night. This was fine in theory, except we retired to the nearest available pub at the conclusion of the day’s proceedings, and after one pint I could no longer feel my face.

In previous incarnations, this would have queued a wild night of drunken antics complete with table top dancing, a shoe left in a gutter, and possibly my knickers left on a lamp post, but I am older, wiser and vastly more tired these days so the only thing is queued was me going to my bed at an hour suitable for very small children.

Lightweight drinking escapades aside, it was a wonderful afternoon and I greatly appreciate the ten nine people who turned up (some after long drives) to be the guinea pigs for the maiden appearance of this course and have their blog posts picked apart by a roomful of weirdos off the internet. Joe Scanlon, Mike and Matt Kane, Julian Alubaidy, Aedan Ryan, Gordon Murray, Ger Hartnett, Keith Shirley, and Linda FitzPatrick all deserve kudos for braving the Master Class format, which is a bit of a scary prospect all on its own. It’s not for the feint of heart – as Joe Scanlon noted in his Twitter stream, “Well that’s my test post fucked out the window.” (That wasn’t quite true, for the record, and he did get points for a hysterical post title.)

But the anonymous feedback forms at the end of the course were spectacular, and the people who left comments all noted that they loved the Master Class format, which I’m completely delighted about.

My one regret was that I fully intended to also have a brainstorming session for topics each business could be covering to appeal to their audiences, and that just slipped my mind when I re-shuffled the running order at the last minute. I’m very sorry about that, so if you attended the course, you can drop me a phone call and I’ll gladly throw some ideas at you if you like.

PS: Cheers for the room rental whip round, guys! For anyone else interested in meeting space in Cork, the Lancaster Lodge is an excellent venue, highly recommended.

Everyone who attended the Train the Trainers course in August agreed to offer their own free class in turn, and I’m fulfilling my promise to Damien Mulley by holding a Blogging Master Class on 2 December, 2008 in Cork. This is an excellent opportunity to meet other bloggers, learn some new blogging skills, and get your arse kicked by me without having to pay for it like normal clients do.

What’s a Master Class? It’s a term from music education and refers to a particular format for learning:

The difference between a normal class and a master class is typically the setup. In a master class, all the students (and often spectators) watch and listen as the master takes one student at a time. The student usually performs a single piece which they have prepared, and the master will give them advice on how to play it, often including demonstrations, and admonitions of common technical errors. The student is then usually expected to play the piece again, in light of the master’s comments.

And whilst I’m not pimping myself as a blogging master (there is no such thing), that’s broadly what we’ll be doing. Over the course of the afternoon, we’ll take four people’s pre-prepared blog posts in turn, and edit for content, formatting, voice and technical details like images and linking. As with a traditional master class, this will be an actual, hands-on learning experience. Unlike a traditional master class, there will be no cellos, but there will be lots of group participation.

That will take two or three hours, and we’ll wrap up with a mini-workshop on maximising and marketing your blog, because when you put that kind of effort into your posts, God knows you deserve some readers.

The workshop will cover:

• What and when to blog
• Writing compelling content
• Using categories and tags effectively
• Learning from statistics
• Promoting your blog
• Strategic linking
• Cheap and cheerful tools

Although the exercises are always good practice, this course is more geared towards business bloggers than personal bloggers, and preference for hands-on editing will accordingly be given to those blogging in a commercial capacity.

Date: 02 December, 2008
Time: 1 – 5 PM
Venue: Lancaster Lodge, Washington Street, Cork
Cost: Free. Woo hoo! Parking also free
Bring: Laptop, wifi thingie, draft blog post

So if you’d like to come along, please click here to register – I’m happy to do this with a minimum of three people and maximum of twelve, and I promise it will be fun.

And that yes, there will be fag breaks.

Update: There are three eight people signed up already, so this gig is definitely on. Woot!

So I’ve been drafted in to speak at PodCamp Ireland – Krishna De rang me up this morning to point out that if I am going to be there anyway, I might as well open my mouth and do something. I was a little surprised because I assumed that something called “PodCamp” was all about, well, podcasting – a subject about which I know next to nothing – but apparently it covers all kinds of social media. Who knew?

Anyway, Krishna suggested that I do something around design for blogs and websites, but to be honest, I can’t. I suck at talking about design. There are a lot of reasons for that, but at the end of the day I just find design very difficult to be articulate about.

So instead, after a quick Twitter poll for topics, I’m going to be presenting on How to Market Your Website or Blog (Without Making the Internet Hate You.) I have more than a month to put this presentation together, but I’m pretty sure it will break down into the specifics of conversational marketing, generating press and PR, and paid advertising.

I’ve been doing a couple of these informal presentations, so I’m also pondering getting a bit more organised about presenting materials and having downloadable slides and handouts available after each one, just so they’re more accessible to people who missed the gig or want the notes.

Realistically, that probably means a redesign. God help me.

Photo ©TheConsumerist

One thing I’ve noticed is that Irish companies in particular seem strangely hesitant to put themselves forward for things, be it press, social business introductions, or award nominations. This is, in a word, stupid. Unless you are paying a very, very good PR company, the person whose job it is to promote your business is you. While sure, some of your customers or clients may think of you and throw your name in the hat for this or that, there isn’t a lot of sense in sitting on the sidelines and hoping someone will ask you to the ball.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with going after something, and hey – if you don’t make it, nobody will know so that’s okay. These quickly approaching deadlines are on my list, and I hereby challenge you to put them on your list, too.

This is the inaugural year for the Irish Web Awards, being held in Dublin on October 11th. Rumour has it that nominations may open to the public in the next day or so, but you can (and bloody well should) nominate your site in the applicable categories. Whether any of my clients make the short list this year or no, I’m going – at €30 a ticket, it’s a bargain for a great night out and Christ knows I need to leave the house.

The Irish Internet Association’s Net Visionary Awards are also taking nominations until Friday, 12 September. I do love a black tie do, but at €250 a ticket I’ll only be dusting off my ballgown in the extremely unlikely event I make the shortlist. Still, this is great PR for any company, so if you fall into any of the categories or love a site that does, those nomination forms are not going to fill themselves out!

One place I definitely will be going to is PodCamp in Kilkenny on the 27th of September. My other half has been drafted as a speaker and is doing From Broadcast to Podcast. I also have a couple of clients ripe for podcasting who I will be dragging along by way of encouraging them to get their feet wet in the podcast pond.

Finally, I have one more, top secret, soon to be revealed event planned for September, but I’m scheduling it around the previously mentioned Girl Geek Dinner in Cork on Sunday September 7th, 2008? There’s still time to sign up if you’re of the XX persuasion — the table is about 1/3rd booked and this event could use a little love if you’re inclined to help get the word out. Thanks! :)

Pat Phelan, who very kindly bought me dinner last night (and is, by the way, looking positively svelt these days, the bastard) asked a question on his blog today about filtering all those things we’ll broadly call stewardship offers. These are the people and organisations who want to solicit you to be a mentor, give you seats on their boards, or have you as their official or unofficial go-to guy for business and strategy advice. They do not, however, want to pay you.

I have to say that I am the original Girl Who Can’t Say No, so frankly Pat should take whatever I have to offer with regards to this question and chuck it directly out the window. I spend at least as much time doling out advice, contacts and expertise on things I’m not being paid to do as I spend doing things I am being paid to do — sometimes for clients, sometimes just for random people who have been referred in or wandered by. I have a terrible time turning anyone away, and I sincerely enjoy getting to meet, talk to and yell at a wide range of really fabulous people, but recently I’ve begun looking at things through the lifeboat analogy.

You’re on a lifeboat, with the Titanic sinking gracefully in the background. You only have so many people you can fit on the boat. Your family, your closets friends and your business are going to take up most of those seats, and that leaves only so many spots left over. With the handful of seats you have available, you then have to make what are frankly tough choices.

Do you take the strongest passengers, those with the greatest chance of making it, or do you take the weakest survivors, those who need help the most? Do you leave behind the people you think are most likely to make it without you, or do you leave behind the ones most likely to go under anyway? Do you invest your capacity in awesome business models or awesome people? Do you grab the folks nobody has ever heard of because you like them and see something good there, or do you pimp out and jump on board with the ones getting good press, good buzz and something that smells suspiciously like a pending VC offer?

However you decide to triage, the fact is that there will be some people to whom you simply cannot offer a seat. And the reality is that if you try to take on board every poor bastard waving his hand in the water, you’re going to sink. The lifeboat will go down in the form of a divorce, a heart attack or a receivership — and take everyone with it.

Were I Pat Phelan, I’d restrict myself to one of each: one Little Start Up That Could, one Next Big Thing, and one I’m Hitching My Star to This Ride Because It’s Good for Me, Never Mind Them. I don’t believe anyone can really truly nurture more than that unless it is their full time job. But because I’m a sucker, I’d maybe also book a day a month for everyone else who knocked on my door, to meet and talk and then walk away.

And most importantly, I’d start making the mountains come to Mohammed, because if my name’s Pat Phelan, I spend entirely too much time on planes as it is.

It’s not often that revolutions happen in retail – one of the most entrenched, least progressive sectors out there. I mean, sure, there’s the whole web thing, but aside from that, the creation of IKEA and the invention of the January Sale, I’m hard pressed to think of anything that really makes consumers wiggle with glee.

But there is a revolution going on at Sleep Squad, a Chicago mattress retailer. Their company story and the way they’re retailing is described in a great article at Furniture Style, but in a nutshell:

You select the mattress attributes you want online, they throw a bunch of matching products into their truck showroom, and they drive to you. You lay down and test out the selections in the mobile showroom, and if you’re particularly happy with one of your choices, you buy it right there. They deliver it directly from the truck to your home minutes later.

This is, in a word, brilliant.

One aspect of Sleep Squad I find really interesting is that founder Michael Cote doesn’t come from a long line of home furnishing retailers, or anything even close. He used to head up nationwide B2B sales for T-Mobile. When he decided to get out and go retail, he surveyed households for the most common items over a particular price mark, and then cross-checked his data with an existing survey on the buying experiences that made consumers the most miserable. That’s how he chose mattresses; because, in his words, “This industry is ripe for change.”

Speaking of the need for change, I do have two criticisms of Sleep Squad, neither of which has anything to do with their product or their retail model.

First of all, their logo is pants. Well, that’s not actually true; it’s a cute rendering of a bed. But they are not selling beds, or even mattresses. They are selling a buying experience, and that buying experience is all about the truck. The truck is their market differentiator, and the truck should be their logo.

They don’t need to create an iconic image for their business; they have one already, and it is their business.

Secondly, they need an image gallery, pronto. I don’t understand, really, how this works. I have no idea how you shove up to 26 mattresses into a truck that doubles as a showroom, but I’m pretty interested. I want to know what the show room I’m supposed to lie down in looks like, before I trundle out there in my bunny slippers. And, you know, since I’m potentially going to be testing products in my nightgown, some nice, reassuring in situ photos of the sales staff I’ll be meeting in the truck would be a plus, too.

There are couple of other things they could do to help position themselves to their best advantage with consumers, but really, despite the oversights, I’m cheering for this business. This is a great way to look at a very traditional sector and do something new and consumer driven, and I love this sort of thinking.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a definite upsurge in people contacting me to ask if I’m available for some consulting hours. By and large, these are companies who want help with traffic, conversions, online marketing campaigns, issues of stickiness, or general communications strategies that do not suck.

While this is great, I always worry about wading in with new clients who want to know if I can help them.

Because the answer is usually, yes, I can work with you. But you’re probably not going to like it.

When I was more active in Second Life and doing consulting for real life and virtual-only brands, my clients always used to joke that they wanted t-shirts that said “I Survived Sabrina Dent’s Business Boot Camp” to commemorate the ordeal.

My real life clients probably think the same thing but are too scared to ask.

Here is the thing. If I’m working with you, you can pretty much assume I think something about your site, your product or your service is great. But I also assume you’re not paying me a (very reasonable) hourly fee to tell you how awesome everything is and outline all the bits that that are working really well.

I’m assuming you’re asking me in to tell you what the problems are, with your site or with your products or with your online marketing, and sometimes, even if you didn’t realise it, all of these things at once.

This is an unpleasant experience.

I’m also very focused on the bottom line. If something doesn’t work, I don’t want to know the story of how you designed that ad or developed that website feature or why you adopted a particular strategy or where your development bottlenecks are. In fact, if you persist in telling me, I may hang up on you. Because those things do not matter to the end user, and the best thing I can do to help you is vigorously maintain my perspective as an outsider to bring you unfiltered feedback.

The clients I click best with, the clients who get the most value for their money are the ones who are prepared for tough love, who are hungry for real information, who don’t have their egos tied to their products, and who sit on the other end of the phone and say “Bring it, bitch.”

These are the clients who get t-shirts.

The back of that t-shirts says “And my business is better for it.”

I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds last night where there was a montage about a physicist who was a brilliant theorist because he could see string theory in action, literally visualise it in action in front of him. It reminded me of (and was clearly lifted from) A Beautiful Mind, in which John Nash has a similar visual relationship with Group Theory. It is possibly worth noting that both of these guys, whilst brilliant, were also schizophrenic.

I am neither particularly brilliant nor particularly schizophrenic, but I can relate to the mind-mapping experience as depicted on film because I have a similarly uh, active imagination when it comes to organising information. This was particularly useful when working with vast government clients who had tons of information to distribute online; left alone in a conference room with a stack of notecards, I could break it down their information and lay it out in a flow of information architecture that was intuitive to the eventual site visitors because it was intuitive to me, even if wasn’t the way the organisation itself visualised or organised it’s own data. Mapping it mentally took no time at all; it was the writing out and physically arranging the notecards bit that could take hours.

In my little schizophrenic way, I have a handy knack for seeing, visually, how information should flow, to whom and from where, where it should enter and where it should leave.

It occurred to me this morning that this is there’s a kind of related intelligence businesses need when they enter social spaces like MySpace or Facebook – but rarely seem to have. The problem is that a lot of marketing people catch on to the latests buzz, like “everyone is on Facebook” and simply follow the herd. They turn up, create an account for their brand, and have no clearcut strategy on what they’re going to do there. I assumed, for example, that Ben & Jerry’s – an extremely personal brand ripe for Facebook – would have a storming Facebook strategy and a massive Facebook entourage. When I went to add them as a Friend, it was clear they had no strategy at all and, accordingly, 82 followers.

Needless to say, I didn’t add them as a Friend.

Contrast this with Greenpeace USA, which is working Facebook like a hooker on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. They get that people come to Facebook to interact with their friends, and that to have friends on Facebook, they need to give people something to interact with or something to do. In their case, they’re providing lots of video to watch and photos to share, plus posting on their own message wall. They are also participating in a viral giving campaign, and while they’re not raising a ton of cash, I’m pretty sure this campaign will be “shared” heavily on Facebook, effectively working as a native viral to increase the numbers of their 1,000+ friends.

The thing is, a strategy for Ben & Jerry’s on Facebook wouldn’t have been hard to formulate if they’d actually looked at how information flows inside that space. They didn’t, or if they did, they failed to understand what they were looking at and made some critical errors right off the bat.

• I love Ben and I love Jerry; they are my friends and I have consumer allegiance to them as personal icons of a brand and product I love. So where are the photos from the company’s history? Where are Ben and Jerry? Come to think of it, where is the ice cream?
• Their account is called Ben & Jerry’s Prudential. Prudential is an insurance company. I do not want to be Facebook friends with an insurance company, thank you very much. Thank God they didn’t call it Ben & Jerry’s Prudential Unilever…
• Their profile’s Information section is straight out of their annual report. It is totally corporate and utterly impersonal; it is the opposite of what Facebook is about. It fails on the platform.
• The only part I can relate to at all is the statement that “Ben & Jerry’s is founded on, and dedicated to, a sustainable corporate concept of linked prosperity.” OK so where are the eco news headlines, where is the sustainability campaign I can get behind?

With a brand like Ben & Jerry’s, you could have amazing viral reach on Facebook. A couple of grand invested in developing an app that lets people give each other free Ben & Jerry’s scoops or build each other ice cream cones would find a home on my Facebook page. They could help undo some of the brand perception damage from being associated with Unilever by creating a fantastic sustainability campaign on Facebook. They could do all kinds of positive things for their brand if they had half a clue about the space they’ve entered.

But they don’t. Ben & Jerry’s is lame. And they have no friends.