Admit it: if you’re a freelancer or online business consultant, sometimes you let prospective clients fall through the cracks. Let’s say, for example, that a friend of a friend contacts you with a vague request for your services. You mean to reply and ask them to be clearer on their needs. But time slips away and before you know it their email is at the bottom of the heap along with that Cialis spam that you meant to delete two months ago.

Even if you always manage to snap up the hot prospects… forgetting, procrastinating or blatantly ignoring the less than stellar ones is bad policy. It lets others know that you’re not walking the talk you spout regularly on your blog… and it’s just an un-smart way to do business.

Let’s review some possible reasons why you’re not answering every query that comes your way:

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Popularity: 100% [?]

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an amazing tool. Through it, people can subscribe to your blog or other feed and get updates from your website, without having to take the extra step of seeking you out.

Most people who are writing and/or reading blogs already know about and are using RSS. You may be doing so yourself. But did you know that you don’t have to have a blog to use RSS? And that there are several creative ways to integrate RSS into your business to increase sales, enhance organizational needs and increase productivity? Here’s how:

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Popularity: 22% [?]

The short answer is yes, but only if used properly.

When I began my online writing career the trend with keywords weighed heavily in favor of putting as many relevant keywords into your copy as possible. This was great for search engine rankings, but made for awkward - if not impossible to read- copy.

Thankfully, search engines today don’t favor pages that are stuffed with keywords, and the practice can even get you banned.

So how, and where, do you use keywords so that you get good search results while still retaining copy that people want to read?

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Popularity: 28% [?]

Not everyone in the world has a high-speed internet connection, and even those who do can’t always see web pages where the images are larger than 30KB.

So if you’ve noticed that sometimes it takes longer than you’d like for your site to load; or, if you’ve observed a high bounce rate (you get clicks, but visitors leave quickly), it may be because you need to shrink your image files.

You don’t have to shrink the actual width and height of your images to reduce the size of the files. What you can do instead, is export them to a compressed size - a .jpg or .gif file. I know how to do this in Adobe Fireworks (this is the image editing program that comes with the Dreamweaver suite). If you use other programs such as Photoshop or Gimp, you’ll have to maybe do a Google search on “image compression.”

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Popularity: 58% [?]

It doesn’t matter if you’re a Fortune 500 exec or a one-man freelancing show. There will be times when you look at companies whose services compete with yours, and your stomach will sink into your shoes.

How can you possibly live up to that, you wonder, gawking at what is clearly The Cleverest Ad Ever Written, or enviously scanning hundreds upon hundreds of comments on a blog that isn’t yours.

I’m here to tell you that just because your nemesis appears to be the best thing since sliced bread right now, it does NOT mean that you should throw up your hands and throw in the towel.

What it means is you’ve got to USE those jealous pangs to your creative advantage. Some tips and reminders from a copywriter who refuses to see success as a popularity contest.

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Popularity: 34% [?]

…they’re for careers, too.

Career Coach Hallie Crawford’s Identifying Your Purpose Teleclass kicks off May 7

Moving forward with personal and career goals can be tough if you’re unsure about what you really want. If you…

• Are seeking greater fulfillment in your current career but don’t know how to make it happen
• Have areas of your life where you feel “stuck” (like a hamster on a wheel – running frantically but getting nowhere)?
• Are completely lost about what you want to do in your career or have so many career ideas in your head that you can’t choose just one

…then Hallie’s Identifying Your Purpose Teleclass is for you.

Kicking off May 7, 2008, this sought-after program is a 6-part interactive group teleclass that includes 3 calls per month for 2 months. Participants have unlimited email access to Career Coach Hallie Crawford for extra guidance.

As an added bonus, participants receive a copy of the e-book, Unlocking Your Purpose and audio recordings of Jumpstart Your Career, Achieving Work/Life Balance and Emotional Freedom Technique Teleclass.

With a cost of just $500, this is an unprecedented opportunity to get your career and life on track and running smoothly toward success and fulfillment.

Spots are limited so reserve yours today!

Click here for additional information and registration.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Sundays come all too soon for busy entrepreneurs like myself. Didn’t I JUST create this blog? Sheesh.

Today’s link buffet lineup, for your reading pleasure:

Copywriting legend Bob Bly, for displaying a bit of un-Bly-like snark on his post, DM Dead? Not by a long shot.

Mark from Productivity 501 posted some tips for getting the most from your Large Sized Monitor.

(Yes, if you work on the internet, size DOES matter. D’oh! I want to say that my monitor is 21 inches but I’m really not sure and I don’t have a tape measure handy. I know it’s big, yet not big enough. And yes, I do shrink my resolution and make windows smaller as Mark suggests. Fact is, I’d be a lot cooler if I were on a Mac.)

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends appeals to the artist that lives inside us all with her story about Wilson Ng, the tech-writer-turned-cartoonist.

Over on Lockergnome.com, a blogger known as “Outsider” gives GoDaddy.com the thumbs down for selling his domain out from under him with no warning.

(I’m inclined to suggest to this fellow that maybe he opened his GoDaddy.com user account with an email address that he doesn’t check very often? Or, perhaps he signed up using an active email address but then MOVED? This is the reason why I open new hosting accounts with a Yahoo email address, even though my host, PowWeb.com, suggests that’s a bad idea. But what do they know?)

That’s all for Sunday. The copywriter is about ready for a nap.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Good news; one of my copywriting invoice-dodgers has broken her alleged 2-month vow of silence, claiming that “the check is in the mail.”

Although the real proof is in the pudding, I tend to believe this client because this is the third time I’ve done work for her and she did pay for the other two jobs. (Although I will say that it took a fair amount of hounding before she finally coughed it up for the second assignment.)

I don’t know if people are total train wrecks or what. Maybe they think that if they don’t respond to your invoices, you’ll eventually go away?

What’s your experience with bad payers? I was thisclose to handing my two problem children from February’s billing cycle over to a collections agency. (I have another guy that I may still do this with.)

Let me just review the series of events that took place here:

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Popularity: 33% [?]

A good copywriter should be well practiced in the art of perspective jumping - not just in your marketing communication, but with your client relationships as well. While I was always pretty good at hopping into the minds of my own clients… I was never so tuned in to them as when I began outsourcing aspects of my own marketing.

Here is my take on what small business clients not only want, but desperately need from the people who we outsource our jobs to.

“The Small Business Client Wishlist” from Dina at Wordfeeder.com.

Small business clients wish that service providers would take the initiative.

I know that many freelance professionals wait there passively, thinking “Well, if my clients needed my services, they’d call or send an email.” The truth is that sometimes business owners can’t catch their breath long enough to say what it is that they want, let alone map it out in steps.

I guarantee that the next freelancer of mine who appears in my email inbox and asks for work WILL get it, even though right now I have no idea of what that assignment will be. Believe it; small business owners are THAT busy. If you’re looking for work, just say so. Clients do not spend time wondering how much work you do for other clients. We just like to know that you’re available for US.

Small business clients wish for marketing without ego.

Being on the flip side has allowed me to experience the unspoken friction that happens when clients make copy changes that copywriters don’t appreciate or agree with. There are two occasions where the copywriter has the right of way in this situation. One, is if the copy changes that the client implements might affect sales. (Let’s say the client deletes the call to action or deletes their own URL - yes it happens.) And two, if the client accidentally says something in the copy that blatantly makes them look unintelligent.

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Popularity: 43% [?]

The first year you do business online, you’ll love the convenience of instant payments by PayPal. But then your business will grow a little more, and some customers will ask you to pay by credit card. You must upgrade your PayPal account in order to offer them this.

Once your account is upgraded, PayPal will help themselves to a wee little service charge for every transaction you make. Bank-account-to-bank-account payments incur one fee, and then credit card payment fees are even higher. The regular PayPal fee is 2.9% plus .30 USD. I forget what the credit card fee is; I think I blocked it out.

Gradually though, as your client invoices grow larger, you’ll see more and more money being deducted from what they pay you. You might think, “Oh, it’s such a such a small amount.” But what if I told you that you’d be making $70,000.00 this year? And then what if I said that I was going to take out of that $2,030.30, for no real reason. You’d be disappointed, right?

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Popularity: 18% [?]