Smartlife

To give a naturally personable and approachable feel to your marketing efforts, it can be valuable to make use of cartoons and cartoon-like visuals. This can be very effective both online and offline, making good use of humor and caricacture to lighten the mood. However, most people are not very skilled in this style of illustration.

Thankfully, just as there are freelance writers who specialize in different types of written content, there are artists who are cartooning experts. They can be great for the creation of mascots, single-frame comics, and…

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.…

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…

Persuasive presentations can win you new customers and funding for your ideas. Thoughtful presentations can establish or enhance your reputation as an expert in a specific field of study or line of work. Similarly, a poor presentation probably won’t win you anything and might even mar your credibility.

Microsoft PowerPoint is the number one tool for constructing and delivering media-based presentations. It’s also the most abused. Sitting through a poorly made presentation, or one where the presenter is reading from the slides, is pure torture.

When you’re putting together a blog, outsourcing some of the writing is a good place to start. But you can outsource far more — from the actual setup and design of your blog, to SEO and marketing, there are a wide range of blogging professionals ready to help you. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of 50+ blog service providers — browse through their sites, look at their portfolios, and see which professional fits your blog’s needs.

If you’re trying to build an online presence for yourself or for your business, you almost certainly have asked this question: “Who will make the website?” Often one of the most difficult parts about building a website is quite simply finding someone to build it. There are definitely a lot of web developers on the Internet. So many of them in fact it’s actually quite difficult to figure out whom to hire.