OK so at this point in the season you have already spent quite a bit purchasing presents for those around you. Whether you agree with the commercial nature of the season or not, it is hard to argue with the meaning behind this practice. Show appreciation for those around you by providing useful and thoughtful gifts.

This year I suggest you not only show appreciation to your friends and family (and do this first and foremost) but also your freelance career. Sure your career probably hasn't purchased you a gift and it might not directly say "thank you," but I assure you that karma will take care of you in the end.

All jokes aside your freelance or business needs constant love, attention and appreciation. It is easy to get into the mindset where you are comfortable with a long term contract or a specific set of clients with out thinking about how you can continue to grow and improve your practice.

Gifts of Education

One of the best ways you can improve your business, freelancing or career is to improve on your skills. This can be done through practice (which you should be doing constantly) and by making an effort to learn new theories, techniques and skills.

1. Buy the Web Design Business Tool kit

This is probably the best all inclusive book / kit I have come across when it comes to building a successful web design business. Filled with plenty of great information, sample documents and new ideas you can be sure that you will find at least a few great ideas to build your business.

Read more about it on sitepoint.com

2. Attend a Conference

Sure they can be expensive and often times there are podcasts that you can check out afterward but you can't put a price on the networking and connections that you can make by attending just a few good conferences. Becoming a part of the web design community on a personal and real level can do wonders for your career.

I suggest looking into:

• An Event Apart
• SXSW
• Future of Web Design
• Wordcamp

3. Read Some Books

There are a lot of great books out there on all aspects of web design. You just need to take the time to read them and expand your skills. This year I see more and more emphasis on web analytics, web strategy and other forms of online marketing. Some books to check out:

• Web Analytics 2.0
• Landing Page Optimization
• Sexy Web Design
• 4 Hour Work Week (expanded)

Gifts of Efficiency

Being more efficient is a long standing hobby of mine. If you are like me, you have lots of ideas and aspirations to do great things but are severly limited by the amount of time you can dedicate. Not only will you be rewarded with more time and less stress, but being more efficient will help you keep your clients happy and increase revenues. Hard to argue with those perks eh?

1. Improve your Book Keeping

Yes I know, for creative types doing accounting is probably the last thing we would ever want to do. However the insight that you can gain by having a clear picture of your cash flow and expenses is invaluable. It can help you work harder to hit your revenue goals and keep you apprised to how much you are spending. If you don't want to take the plunge and hire an account consider signing up for one of these services that will save you time and makes accounting easy:

• Freshbooks
• Blinksale

2. Improve your Project Management

I used to discount how important project management was. As long as projects were moving forward things are great right? ah if it were only so easy. The more time spent planning the smoother projects will go. Here are some options:

• Basecamp
• ActiveCollab
• Zoho
• Getting Things Done

3. Hire help

If you can pay someone less than your billable rate for any task you are doing then by all means do it. The increase in time will let you find more and better projects as well as spend more time on what you are really passionate about. I recommend either finding interns, contractors, virtual assistants or full time employees.

• Authentic Jobs
• oDesk
• Find a Virtual Assistant

4. Impove your Process

It is always a good idea to evaluate and try and improve your internal process. Is there something you could spend time on now to save more time later. I take time quarterly to try and look at what activities we perform at 3.7 DESIGNS constantly and try and improve our approach. I recommend the following books:

• Website Redesign 2.0
• Getting Things Done
• 4 Hour Work Week (expanded)

Gifts of Promotion

When you provide a service as opposed to a product you are faced with a situation where people are paying for something that seems intangible. You can't hold, feel or look at a website. One of the great ways to make your service feel tangible is by getting actual tangible items that carry your brand. This can be everything from business cards, folders, coffee mugs, letterhead, etc…

By providing several items to a client or potential client that are tangible items from your business it builds confidence that you have an established and credible company.

1. Paper Products

• Overnight Prints

2. Create a Portfolio

• Mixbook

3. Schwag

• Cafe Press
• UberPrints.com

Gifts of Reoccurring Income

Doing some work to develop some reoccurring income streams will allow you to be more selective about what projects you take on, who you hire for help or what other investments you are willing to make. Because a lot of time these can be developed so that the income is not specifically tied to an amount of hourly work (which is typically how we price our services) it provides a whole range of options that simply getting more projects does not.

Continue Learning…