Around this time of year, many freelancers and other small creative businesses in the United States start receiving requests for a lot of W-9’s and other tax-related forms from their clients. Tax advice is well beyond the scope of this tips newsletter. However if you are getting a lot of requests for W-9’s this month, […]

Many years ago Seth Godin wrote a small book called The Bootstrapper’s Bible. It is no longer in print. More recently Seth updated that book, divided the ideas into short sections, and released it as a free ebook: Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible – Free PDF. The original version was published before Permission Marketing, Unleashing the […]

This is the oddest line item in the Creativetechs marketing budget for 2006. 55 bucks for our message on a digital piece of toast?

Link: Your Name on Toast

I’m a Seth Godin junkie, and he mentioned this site on his blog. I would have dismissed this out of hand from any other source.

A couple years ago I was checking to see if CraigSwanson.com was still available. It was not. In fact to drive that point home, I found this blog entry by another Craig Swanson commenting on being one of thousands of people with the exact same name:

“‘Craig Swanson'” is quite possibly the ‘John Smith’ of the late 20th century.”

Somewhat sobering to be just one in thousands of Craig Swanson’s out there. Too bad I wasn’t the first one to register the domain. If your name is still available, grab it.

Almost every creative studio uses written contracts of some form with their clients. Many studios invest time and legal fees in developing their own custom contracts, while other designers will borrow contract language from the back of a design business book (or from a studio where they used to work). However your studio developed your […]

The October issue of the Creative Business newsletter has a valuable two-page white paper titled “How To Answer: I’d Like The Computer Files”, which discusses the legal and business issues involved when a client requests a copy of the original files used to build a recent project.

This increasingly common client request can pose a dilemma for many creative studios. Should you give them up? Do you have to? How do you respond to your client’s request?

Here is a tip that came up during the hour of Q&A after last week’s “Blog Your Portfolio” talk at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts: “What are some of the best tools out there for keeping track of my studios’s online buzz?” Here’s an easy tool we like: SocialMeter.com Type in the URL of your […]

Thanks to everybody who came out to SVC last Tuesday for our free “Blog your Portfolio” talk. Every seat in the house was taken, and we ended up staying almost a hour after the presentation answering questions and talk with people. As promised, here is a PDF of the slides from our talk: Blog Your […]

Every graphic designer who earns part of their living designing websites should be required to read at least chapter 14 of Dave Taylor’s book Growing Your Business with Google.

Tip: Copywriters who want to learn to craft search engine-friendly copy should read this book too.

Craig’s note: That’s my own copy shown at right. I read it on vacation in early 2006 while we were planning our own CreativeIQ blog. I thought I knew a fair bit about web design. The dozens of post-it notes and highlighted sections are a testimony to how much I was missing about designing sites that work well with search engines.

This week we reviewed (and highly recommended) the book Growing Your Business with Google by author Dave Taylor. If you like to watch video instead of read, we’ve added a link below to Dave’s presentation on business blogging at a recent summit in Florida