Smartlife

The purpose of a press release is to bring a piece of news to the attention of the media: typically, you’ll send out a press release to promote your business or organization with the hopes of creating awareness as well as increasing your income.

Press releases can be very effective tools to bring the media’s attention to a particular event or topic. However, it’s easy to send out press release after press release, yet feel like you have nothing to show for it. You need to know how to effectively…

If you’ve got a design project in mind, going directly to a freelancer is often the best choice. While other options, such as crowdsourcing, are available, a good freelancer will be able to work with the ideas you have for your project and can meet the exact specifications you need. Furthermore, the act of choosing a freelance designer and the tasks that go with it can help you clarify what you want from you project — just looking through a portfolio can offer a wealth of ideas.…

Startups can have some special concerns when it comes to the process of getting a patent. Hiring a patent lawyer can get pricey, and there’s a lot of paperwork that you have to get just right so that the U.S. Patent Office doesn’t reject your application. But if you have a concept worth protecting, it’s important to get a patent — and it is possible to do so for a reasonable amount of time and money.

The Patent Process

When you apply for a patent, you’re asking the government to…

One of the founding Smartlife principles is that you should never have to do anything twice — the computer should be able to do it for you. The Internet has extended this awesome idea, brilliantly declaring that nobody should do anything a second time. By engaging crowdsourcing, thousands of everyday tasks have been taken online, from your personal party checklist to building bits of your business.

Familiarizing yourself with these resources takes a small-time investment but the payback is incredible. Never again do you need to start with a blank…

If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of crowdsourcing design work, check out this post and then zip on back.

Since first reading Sean Johnson’s excellent post on how to crowdsource designs last April, I’ve had the experience of running several design contests. 99designs has been my preferred venue, but there are others out there such as crowdSPRING and LogoTournament.com.

So what has my experience taught me? Here I share:

1. Talent hub. If you need…

Whether you creating a social media campaign to promote your own business or you’re helping out someone else, there are a surprising number of steps that you can outsource to both individuals — and trusty online tools. While some don’t advocate outsourcing your social media networking activities, we don’t wholly agree as long as you’re smart about it. The fact is, you can reduce the amount of time you spend on social media — such as posting tweets, building links, marketing content, researching keywords, managing email lists, creating online…