1.  Doing an occasional job for free lets people know your level of passion about what you're doing.  This goes a long way in removing the need for income.  It's simply easier to work without the pressure of needing to work.

2.  Free work really gives you the opportunity to improve certain processes.  Non-paying clients shouldn't have any problem with you wanting to raise the bar.  These are clients that you can use to figure out what works and what doesn't.

3.  Creating community is easier if there isn't a budget tied to it.  This is an awesome way to simply manage your presence in your community and establish yourself.

4.  An occasional free job is a good way to boost your portfolio.  This can be a good way to proactively manage your client list.

5.  Bottom line, it's just a nice thing to do!

I wrote something a few days ago on another blog related to  Aikido  about a technique that is used to protect you and at the same time can be used to protect the person attacking you.  The underlying philosophy can also be adopted in your approach to blogging and using social media. One of the cool things about social media is that every opinion matters, even if two opinions are completely different.  Connie Reece wrote a really good post on how a blogger unfavorably reviewed a product and instead of going on the defense, the business owner was advised to befriend the blogger and in turn has created relations with the blogger and the blogger's audience.

I found some really incredible posts relating to being more productive.  Darren Rowse talks about batch processing and Abhijeet Mukherjee talks about the discipline required for being a web worker.  I'm putting their words of wisdom to work for me and combining it with Google Notes and Firefox to accomplish more.  Here's how

1.  Add the following bookmark to Firefox:
http://www.google.com/notebook/ig?hl=__MSG_locale__

2.  Change that bookmark to open as a sidebar rather than a new tab.

3.  Group tasks into blocks of time.  I chose an hour blocks for each *kind* of task.  You can get creative though and develop a schedule that is better fitting.  I'll likely be editing my schedule and refining it.  For example writing blog posts might take a full hour but processing email might only take half an hour.  I'm going to follow my schedule for a month to really investigate the full impact.

So I've got a question on twitter and plurk asking how many "imaginary friends" you have on FriendFeed.  If you aren't using FriendFeed, its simply a way to agregate all the activity of you friends on the internet.

One of the features of this site lets you view activity of your friends even if they aren't using FriendFeed.  FriendFeed calls these friends imaginary...

Ok, first off, in this day and age if you spend any amount of time interacting on the internet then you have likely gained acquaintences that you haven't necessarily met.  Are those friends any less "real" then people you deal with in person?  The water gets even muddier when you account for people doing business online.

Granted, I'm possibly reading more into this than necessary but I just don't like it.  Why is FriendFeed trying to encourage some sort of dissociative disorder??

Passion - This translates to loving what you write about.  Does enthusiasm run rampant through your message?  It should if you really want to get inside your readers' minds. 

Persistance - Repetition is the root of success.  Focus on a particular process and go through the motions, regardless if you think you will fail.  It's very possible that you will.  Write it down and then do it again.  Documenting your failure will help establish you as an authority.  "This is what I did that didn't work and here is how I corrected it."

Patience - You'll have to wait in order to understand this one

1.  Define your processes
Establishing your processes will ensure that you don't spend too much time wondering what you should be doing

• How do you get business?
• How do you promote yourself?
• How do you manage client interactions?
• How do you manage billing?

2.  Distribute your content
It's a good idea to find other sites and approach them to do some writing for them.  This will increase your presence and get you exposure as well as establish mutually beneficial relationships

• Write 4 articles.
• Give 2 of them away.
• Keep 2 on your own blog.

3.  Attend networking events that address your clients needs
By attending client events, you help strengthen your stance not only directly with the client but also in that industry.  This has the effect of making it easier for them to recommend you to their colleagues.

• Seminars
• Industry mixers
• Chamber of commerce events

4. Create at least twice as much content as you read
That ratio should probably be higher but the purpose with this is simply to do more.

• Develop a series that explores a topic you just read
• Write three or four articles that relate to a previous post
• Ask for feedback on an issue and write a couple of posts on that.
• Break a large topic into smaller bite size chunks

5. Establish relations with others that are doing what you want to do.  Then do something different.
This is a matter of simply establishing your unique position and will be a demonstration of your creativity.

• Highlight something or someone in your industry that doesn't get much attention
• Offer an addon that will help complement a given service