Posted in MicroBusiness Musings, General Freelance Info at 8:37 pm by andy

Most people wait until after they have a disaster to think about a decent backup strategy.  Considering the cost of permanently losing your work — both the time lost and the money spent recovering what you can recover — you’d think people would be a bit more proactive about this… but I suppose that a disaster is a great teacher.

So what kind of backup strategy should you have?

Start with this assumption: your work space is going to be leveled one day by a fire/flood/earthquake/hurricane/tornado/iceberg.  Or your computers are going to get stolen.  You want to be able to recover from this in a reasonable amount of time (say, a week, since you’ll need to get new hardware).

Second assumption: you are going to change files regularly throughout the day and want to back those files up at least once a day.

Third assumption: if you have a project-level screw-up, you want to be able to recover any files you lose within a few minutes. Read more…

Posted in FreelanceLocalTech Chronicles at 7:48 pm by andy

After a really slow holiday season — and totally stopping our marketing for December – we finally made it to 500 listings!

Interestingly, our traffic without having to advertise has been about 70% of our traffic when we were advertising and the cost is a lot less.  So we’re going to spend more time on organic marketing and delay any further advertising until we add a new country or two (Ireland is next!).

Although we’re not the biggest directory by any measure, we definitely have high-quality listings, which is important to clients.  Ever been to a directory and found dead link after dead link while the site owner claimed they had thousands of links?  Not here!  If there’s a dead link, we want to remove it as soon as possible.  Clients appreciate not having their limited time wasted by chasing dead links.