When you’re your own boss, number one employee, and right-hand-person, it’s sometimes hard to stay motivated.
It happens. It’s hard to self-motivate constantly, and as freeing as freelancing can be, keeping yourself on task (along with all of the other things you’re doing to run your own business) can be difficult in itself.
Happily, freelancing today is made much easier with apps to keep you on task, strengthen your focus, and keep you accountable. Here are a few apps that will keep that laser-like focus— okay, productive, human focused— while working on your own.
Taking the leap and working for yourself can be a daunting experience.
Where do you begin? What tools do you need (or not need) to get things going?
While my expertise as a business consultant is revenue growth and workflow science (basically how to increase income and decrease cost), my passion is to build tools for and to share best practices with those who want to work for themselves.
We’re thrilled to announce that the first version of about.me premium is now available. Using about.me on your own personal domain has been one of the top requested features from our users and is now ready to use!
Having your about.me page on your custom domain (example: yourname.com) is the ultimate in personal branding and is a great way to come up on the first page for a Google search for you name. Here’s what you get in addition to the free features:
Domain Mapping
Display your about.me page on your custom domain. If you don’t currently have a custom domain, we makes it easy to purchase a custom domain through Namecheap.com after you upgrade.
Remove about.me Navigation Bar
Minimize the about.me branding on your page and create a cleaner look by removing the top navigation bar.
Google Analytics
Add Google Analytics to your site to get more in-depth statistics about your page.
Priority Support
Get to the front of the line with any support or help request.
If you already have an about.me page, head over to about.me/upgrade to upgrade your account to about.me premium. If you don’t have an about.me page, please sign up and you’ll be able to upgrade after you create your page. Signing up takes less than two minutes.
About.me premium is the natural progression of our main goal to provide you with the best starting point for your personal identity service on the web. We are interested in hearing your feedback about premium and any features you’d like to see in the future.
We’re excited to announce that about.me has acquired Wefollow. The Wefollow service is a beautifully designed directory that enables people to discover others with common interests (e.g. sports, politics, comedy, etc.).
Wefollow started as a Twitter directory in 2009 and was founded by JeffHodsdon and Kevin Rose when they were still at Digg. When Digg was sold in 2012, Jeff re-purchased Wefollow and began building it to where it is today. Wefollow has since grown to a community of over 1.3 million users.
This is an exciting step forward in the evolution of about.me as a service and as a company. As about.me continues to grow, it’s increasingly important that we simplify the way users discover people on the about.me platform. Discovery has quickly become one of the most popular uses of about.me and represents a significant opportunity for us to further evolve our platform.
Wefollow’s prominence scores and algorithms help organize and surface users, and will become a key search offering as about.me enhances people discovery on our platform. Eventually, the Wefollow service will be merged with our own and integrated under the about.me brand. In the short term, as we complete an integration of our two products, Wefollow will continue to operate as a stand-alone property.
We are beyond thrilled. Jeff is an amazing talent and a perfect fit with our team and product focus. He will contribute expertise in building beautifully designed consumer web products. We’ve known Jeff for several years, having first met him when he was a co-founder in Milk with Kevin, a True Ventures investment that was acquired by Google last year. Kevin is the lead investor from Google Ventures in about.me, so there is perfect continuity going forward. Jeff will join about.me’s A-list development team with a broad product and engineering role around people discovery and growth. He will work closely with both Ryan and I as well as CTO Andy Hao and the team on product and growth initiatives.
Last week Jacob and I attended the UserVoice Summit. We’re the team that has responded if you’ve ever reached out to us via our Support Center, Twitter or elsewhere. And this was a great event for us to connect with other people working in customer care.
We heard leaders speak from amazing companies and organizations about streamlining process, scaling support, and just sounding human in communications (something we aim for). It was an opportunity to take stock and think about how we support the about.me community.
If you haven’t yet, be sure to stop by our Support center. It includes frequently asked questions but also tips and tricks for making the most of your about.me page. Additionally we gather product ideas and use the features voted on to help determine things that get prioritized to work on.
At the Summit we were even recognized for closing out requests and reports in the forum, which is truly an award for the whole team here! They work hard to address issues and include features into updates to allow our team to provide great support.
If you have any feedback regarding support here or have things you’d like to see us doing, please let us know! We love hearing your ideas.
For our next stop around the world, we head south to Cameroon. Known for its geological and culture diversity, Cameroon has plenty of representation on about.me. Here are some pages we discovered:
For this week’s inspiration, check out these pages from scientists, engineers, space cadets and amateurs who work in space discovery and travel programs.
So you’ve created an awesome page, drafted a page-turning biography, connected a few services – now what? Here are some tips for making the most out of your about.me page after completion.
First, add your personalized about.me URL to your email signature! You can get rid of images that might not load or extra links, and instead point to the one spot online all about you.
Now that your page is complete, let your friends, followers and fans know! Share it to Twitter, Pinterest and more to get your first visitors easily. Then, add your page URL to your profiles at those services. It gives potential followers the context of who you are and what you’re about with one click.
We’ve featured people who love puppies, cats and horses, but what about some of the other members of the animal kingdom? Below are some pages representing other animals.
