Before you look at me like I’ve lost my mind – I haven’t. The competition is being hosted by Websites.com and they’re giving away $10k to the winner. To win this award you need to submit your small business website.

All you have to do is get a website design that kicks ass. The website can be hosted anywhere but you will have to become a member of websites.com to enter the contest which will take you 5 minutes tops. What’s more, websites.com is even giving you a chance to pair up with a web designer of your choice.

If you’re not sure which web designer to go for, they have their own directory of web designers that you can choose from.

Please note that you will have to pay the web designer their fee regardless of whether you win or not. Remember, its not the web designers who’re entering the contest, it’s you. So the designer needs to be paid. Think of it this way, there will no sharing required of the $10k if you win

The deadline to enter is July 29th. You just need to enter the competition to let them know you’re a contestant. The date for submitting the actual website design is in September which gives you more than a month to come up with a kick-ass website design. After the initial judging, the nominees will be put up for public voting and the winner will be announced on October 2nd 2009.

It’s a great competition to boost your business and get you moving in case you’ve been dragging your feet about designing your small business website.

Once you’ve entered the competition, don’t forget to check out the judging criteria. Let us know if you enter the competition (and win)!

P.S: The runner up get $3000.

Things have been crazy in Samar-ville as of late. If I start writing about that, this post will turn into a rant. And I’m trying really really hard to not become an angry ranter.

Every freelancer at one time or another faces situations that are not ideal. Wait, who am I kidding. We face not-so-ideal situations every single day. The following scenarios/situations left me wondering how I would have dealt with them.

I also wondered if it would be easy to do what was so obviously the self respecting solution to them. I’ll let you guys decide.

1. A client stresses upon a deadline in every email but fails to send the required information on time to start/complete the project yet still demands that the work be submitted on the set deadline.
2. If you did a one off gig for someone, and they failed to pay you by the first of next month and still haven’t paid after 20 days. 2 gentle reminders later they’re treating you like you’re being cumbersome.
3. You’re in talks with a potential client. Everything has been sorted out; The number of hours, work involved, future possibilities, rates etc. The client asks you to confirm on the terms set so that they could sent you an NDA,  only to disappear on you after you send the confirmation.

What would you do if you were faced with the above situations? How would you deal with them?

Image credit: Partie Traumatic

Technorati Tags: freelance business, Freelance work, Freelancing

When twitter changed its default setting disallowing users to see @ mentions of people they weren’t following, it became harder to meet and follow interesting conversations and people.

I for one got seriously mad. Twitter practically told me to stop snooping into other people’s conversations with people I wasn’t following. The nerve!

For a while, I was stuck with following back people who followed me. I was at a loss on how to follow new folks. I didn’t have the time to go through countless profiles and see who was following who.

Considering that twitter played the ‘We can’t undo it anytime soon’ card, there wasn’t much that I could do – except find other ways to find people to follow.

Here are two ways I accidentally stumbled upon to converse with people who normally would not have come in my twitter radar.

1. Blip your way to new conversations

As someone who routinely listens to music while working, I like to share it too. The need to share and tell the world about my music taste (cuz I’m a show off that way) made me want to do it on twitter too. After all, music makes you like, totally cool y’know?

Blip.FM is a great way to connect with new people. After spending a few weeks blipping songs for around one hour every couple of days or so, I realized that I was hearing from people who weren’t following me!

The reason was simple, they liked my choice of songs and wanted to share their opinion or recommend some more. Sometimes people would @ me out of the blue because I blipped UB40 and they got nostalgic. Or because they were living in their native town and thought I’d be interested in the trivia – which I was.

Another thing I noticed was that my current followers would RT a song I’d blipped if they liked it. Since RT’s can be seen by everyone, I started getting @ replies from people I couldn’t see them conversing with. (Ha! Take that you meddling twitter!)

Regardless to say, I’ve been conversing with new people regularly and I already know we have our taste in music in common. So not only do I find cool people to follow through twitter, I get an immediate ice breaker too.

For those of you who’re wondering about finding people to follow in your niche through blipping songs, that is taken care of when your followers RT your blip and their followers leave you a message. Half the time, the person is from the niche you’re interested in.

2. RT tweets without links

I tend to RT tweets that I’ve enjoyed for the opinion they express, laugh they gave me or because I identify with it.

It has been a great way to start a conversation with people I follow but don’t usually talk with and find new people to follow.

The key is to add your own two cents to the RT to get the conversation going. A lot of people reply back as they share their own opinions and conversations tend to get interconnected introducing a lot of tweeps to each other.

The IranElection hashtag was the perfect example. I’d RT differing opinions and the conversation flowed. That’s when I realized the impact of RT-ing linkless tweets. I don’t talk politics and/or religion as a general rule and I was not looking to start a conversation on the Iran elections at all.

My reason behind the RT was that I found the sentiment expressed in the tweet in question interesting. That’s where my interest in it ended. My personal thoughts and opinions were supposed to remain my own.

But suddenly people were replying and discussing and I learned some important lessons.

• Don’t RT stuff you’re not willing to discuss
• Linkless RT’s encourage people to talk to you.
• Tweet stuff (thoughts, opinions, sentiments) that will get you Retweeted

Since then, I’ve been RTing tweets that encourage an opinion from people. As a result, I’ve seen an increase in the RT ratio of my tweets, both the linkless tweets and the ones with links.

Everyone has their own story of how they find more people to follow. What’s yours? Have you found any unconventional ways to network on twitter?

Image credit: Respres

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Twitter, Twitter tips, Twitter tricks