The freelance writer gets confused whether he should write a free sample or not. He knows that refusing to write a free sample will mean losing the client, and writing a free sample may result in client’s disappearance, which is not unheard of in the business. Many clients, under the disguise of asking for free samples to evaluate the candidacy for a fictional big project, just take samples from various freelance writers and disappear.

The question is what should a freelance writer do, in situation like that?

There is not one single answer to this. You may or may not write a free sample. It all depends on you and kind of sample being asked to write. I cannot tell you that you should write or not, but I can tell you about the process I go through when deciding on whether to comply with the wish of getting a free sample or not.

Client authenticity checklist

Indeed, you need check the person’s authenticity before saying yes or no to his wish to have a free sample, and you can do this by doing the following things, at least I do these things:

1. Run a Google search with the client’s name, nickname along with the words like scam, cheat, fraud, scammer, etc., one at a time. This is done to find whether there is any reported fraudulent activity related to him. If he has done anything mischievous to people or service providers, you may find something. Well, this does not happen always, but most of the time, you will get what you are looking for.
2. I check the reviews and rating of a client, if I have been approached by him through a freelance exchange websites or forums. If there is enough positive reviews about a client then I think favorably of his request
3. Is the client giving me too rosy a picture to be true? A cheater will often show you a grand, often unrealistic, view of the future, in case you get the work, for which you will have to submit a free sample custom written on topic given by him. I stay away from such bait.
4. I never write a sample, if a client asks for a sample of 500+ words. From my experience I can say that such demands often come from clients with dubious intentions. I often offer to write a sample of not more than 250 words, and occasionally 300 words.

These are steps I run a client through before accepting or rejecting his offer. I think this will work for you. At least you should try this strategy, if you do not have any. Something is always better than having an absolute zilch.

Use twitter search to find the right people

This is as important as conducing a Google search. Twitter search will not only help you find people to network with, but it will also help you search for jobs. Just type in the keyword or hash tag to find the right person to network with. Do not add just anyone because you can. You will not want to get 1000s of useless tweets every single day.

Do not follow everyone back

This is a classic mistake. Most of the newbie do exactly that and end up becoming frustrated of twitter because of the low quality tweets in the timeline. You should follow people back, but only those whose tweets you want to receive. Do not follow everyone. You start doing that and you will start getting more invites. Spammers love this, so do not be the love interest of a spammer.

Follow your friends’ connections

Check out whom your friends are sending DM (direct message) to. These people could be the potential target of your networking effort. Keep a close watch on whom your friends are talking to, and follow those whom you deem suitable.

Promote Yourself

Promoting yourself is an important part of networking. Tell people who you are, and what you stand for. They will not know this if you do not tell them. Tweet links to your work, and add call to action in the tweet. This way you will be seeding your expertise in the community, which definitely will fetch desired result.

Networking takes time and effort, but the return is always good, so do not hesitate in putting time into it. I want you to start working on above suggestions now. You will see the difference.

This is what twitter has done to the giant, and it will also help you a great deal in searching for a job. In this part, I will tell you how you can brand yourself on twitter, and how it will help you.

Customize your profile

The best thing about twitter is it allows you to create a custom profile for your twitter account. You can choose whatever background you want for your twitter profile. Twitter background provides you a wonderful opportunity to brand yourself. Your profile page should speak volume about you.

Theme-based design

Do not choose just any background. This will not do any good. Always remember a good design begins with ideation. With finding a theme for the design. When I say theme I meant what is that one thing that you want to convey to the viewers of your twitter profile. Begin with writing down the points you want to convey until it boils down to one or two core points that you must convey. This will be the essence of your twitter profile.

Now think of a design theme of the blog based on the core you have found.

Designing background

Start designing a background based on the theme you have found. To find the dimension of the background, you can search Google. I do not suggest reinventing the wheel. Just conduct a Google search and you will find a twitter background template.

This is it for now. Go ahead and customize your twitter profile to impress your prospects.

So the best way to approach improving your PageRank, is simply by getting your website out there.  Network and exchange links with as many like minded sites and businesses as possible.  Try to search out sites with higher traffic volumes, and higher PageRanks, as these are the more likely to increase your individual PageRank.  The more quality websites that link back to yours, the better Google will view your site.  The importance of networking just can’t be overstated.  That’s your internet bread and butter, and the better networked you are, the better your website is going to perform.

Remember to use SEO (search engine optimization) for everything you write, as this helps with all things regarding Google.  Your PageRank is also more likely to be higher if you make effective use of SEO.  It will increase search engine success, and the popularity of your site.  Both of which you need to build your Google presence, and therefore your website’s overall presence.

But also remember that improving your Google PageRank isn’t as likely to increase traffic as SEO.  Just because your site has a higher PageRank, does not mean that you’re the most likely to pop up first with a given keyword.  The only way to make that work is SEO and linking to as many other popular websites as possible.  These will also build your PageRank, and should remain your focus for building website traffic.

Well, being as active as possible is a start.  Having no internet identity can be just as bad as having a negative one.  Employers want to see positive extra curricular activity, and work history.  These are cues to what sort of employee you are, so make sure an interviewer can easily find them.  Be active in professional forums, maintain a personal blog, and keep a professionally oriented social networking page.

Make sure that everything you put out there puts you into a positive light.  Anything you want an employer to see needs to be about creativity, positive, and showcasing commitment and hard work.  Don’t bash old employers and bosses, because that’s a big turn off to anybody interested in you.  In fact, don’t bash anybody, or have anything negative on a page that’s intended to be professional, because it will only show you in a bad light.

But don’t forget, what you put out there is only half the battle.  You need to search your name to see what other people are putting out in relation to your name.  Do a search, see if anything comes up from past employers, or if anything you wouldn’t want a potential employer to see pops up.  Takes steps to correct these, or have them removed from search engines if you’re uncomfortable with the material.  Most of the time places like Google are more than willing to work with you, so long as you’re polite and patient.

This very company has now wore a predictor hat and predicting that the future of the web lies in the hands of Chinese language contents and social media. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt in his 45-minute long interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009 made many interesting prediction about the future of the Internet.

You can view the complete interview by clicking on 45-minute long interview of Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt, but for those who do not wish to go through all 45 minutes, I am providing here the key points from the interview.

Highlights of Eric Schmidt’s Interview

• In 5 years, Chinese language content will dominate the web.
• Teenagers who jump from application to application seamlessly are the model of tomorrow’s web.
• Broadband will reach 100mbps in 5-year time.
• The distinction between TV, radio and web from distribution point of view will vanish in 5 years.
• Google is making significant money from YouTube.
• Eric Schmidt believes that future will have more video oriented content.
• Google wants to include real time information in its search result.
• Computing power will improve significantly in next 5 years.
• User generated content will have more audience then any traditional source.
• Google OS Netbook will be available from 2010.

Being unafraid to get your name out there as much as possible is usually a very good factor to have in your camp when applying to a job.  Work on increasing your online presence as much as possible, even Google your own name to see what pops up, in terms of your past accomplishments.  If you like what you see, why not throw an invitation for your prospective employer to do a Google search on you, to look up past accomplishments.  Nothing tells the truth like sources beyond yourself with nothing but good things to say.

Don’t waste your time writing about responsibilities you had beyond just previous job titles.  Usually any interviewer can discern the information that applies to them from that alone, and your time is better sent describing the difference you made at the company, and what you accomplished.  That’s what your next employer cares about, what you did at your previous job, not just what you were expected to accomplish.

Let your personality shine, so many people just send in form resumes, and that get’s extremely tired for the interviewer, and makes you appear unwilling to devote time and effort to a project.  Write everything as you would speak given the opportunity to have an interview.  This way you come across as a real person, and who you are is reflected as much as the abilities you can offer.

Finally, never underestimate the value of a few good references.  Well earned and picked references can be the difference between getting a losing a job opportunity.  Just like you would read a few film reviews when trying to find which movie you want to see, your interviewer needs sources about you, so that they can decipher what to expect and if you are the right addition to the team for them to choose.  Good references are key, so always do what you can to ensure you don’t burn any bridges on your journeys through the corporate system.

Since Google, many attempts were made to change the course of the Internet search industry the way Google did, but despite the industry analysts, and self-proclaimed web gurus promulgations nothing happened. Google kept growing larger and larger, heavier and heavier. The David itself has now become Goliath.

Many blue-eyed entrepreneurs launched their dream projects to disrupt the flow, and cut Google down to size, but nothing happened. Some time back, couple of employees left Google and launched Cuil, it was one of the most ambitious launch since Google.  The search engine looked good. SERP was interesting, but not the content of SERP. This baby came and gone without disturbing the peace.

People even tried several spin-offs, from verticalization to localization to search result aggregation but nothing worked. Search result aggregators like Scour even started offering reward point to use its services, and that made people try Scour. Even I used Scour for many days. My motivation was not entirely point earning, I was interested in much more. I was interested in participation. Despite, what I wanted and what the search aggregator wanted, I switched back to Google, and like me many did.

The war is heating up again. MSN, the third largest search engine, has launched it new, improved search engine Bing. MSN is betting its future in the industry on this new search engine. Bing looks promising. The search results are similar to that of Google’s. Bing is far better than the Google Squared, the new search engine from Google. With Google Squared, Google is trying to flank the attack led towards its home page, but Google Squared lacks the vitality to scare off the new entrants. Google need a relook at the weapon it is using for flanking.

Google needs not only worry about Bing, which appears as an improved version of Google, but it also needs to be watchful of Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha boasts about its power to churn out hard facts and objective data. The search engine is going to be the new Google for data mining, and other kinds of research. A search for your name may not fetch any result in Wolfram Alpha, but a search for an objective data like GDP of a certain country, Dollar exchange rate, weight of moon, depth of Atlantic Ocean, etc. will fetch you the result you were looking for. It will not waste your time as Google does when searching for similar data.

New entrants like Bing and Wolfram Alpha are going to give Google many sleepless nights. For Google, these are the competition worth fighting with. Wolfram Alpha with its power to provide hard facts and objective data, in my view, is going to take away a sizeable portion of Google’s search traffic. People who use Google for hard fact will shift their focus towards Wolfram Alpha. As far as Bing is concerned, it looks just like Google (a me-too) with a better result. Hence, I will not bet my Dollars on Bing.

The number one tactic is picking appropriate keywords for any articles found on your site.  When somebody is looking to Google to find a product or service, they type a few words into Google’s search bar, and sift through the results that pop up.  Which is why you want to appropriately keyword all the content on your site by using terms most likely to be used when somebody is using a search engine.  For example, you want to use the same key phrase relatively often on a page, but not so often that the quality of your written content suffers.  Which means you want your title to involve the key phrase, as well as your Meta Tags, and any photographs on your site should be titled incorporating that same key phrase.

That way anybody who is looking for that specific thing, and types something similar to what your website offers into a search engine, your site is more likely to pop up.  And you want to title your images as such, because that way you can also swipe some traffic from anybody doing an image search, like Google’s or Yahoo!’s image search options.

Search engines also rank you on overall popularity, meaning if your website is found referenced on other websites, you’re more likely to feature well in their search results.  Which is why you want to network and exchange links with as many similar products and companies as you can.  While this sounds like a conflict on interest in most ways, it’s also a fantastic method to get your website out there, and the more people you attract, the more customers/interested parties you will have.

And finally don’t forget to make sure you’ve submitted your website’s main address as well as the address of every page therein to any search engine’s archives.  Google allows you to do this for free, which is what makes them one of your best low cost resources, whereas Yahoo! requires a fee to enter your website into their search result considerations.